I’m using Debian 12, and I’ve been thinking about finally moving from ext4 to btrfs, I was wondering if I should expect issues trying to do this since I have full disk encryption enabled. I have roughly 50% free space available, if that matters. Planning to use btrfs-convert to do it if it’s possible with this situation.

Is this something worth spending time on, or will I have a much easier time just backing up all my data and reinstalling from scratch to do this? It’s just a regular daily desktop, nothing mission-critical.

Edit: After reading all the replies, I’m gonna give it a try. I already have weekly full system backups, but I’m gonna take an extra one right before doing it, just in case, and if it goes wrong I’ll just do it on a fresh install.

  • the_third@feddit.de
    3·
    2 years ago

    Checksumming for data and metadata which avoids bitrot and snapshots are imho the main advantages in desktop use. Streaming snapshots to different devices either locally or via network is potentially more space efficient than rsync because snapshots only contain changed blocks. Depends on the workload though.

      • the_third@feddit.de
        1·
        2 years ago

        No, but it can and will do so transparently in any redundant setup though. I a single disk setup access to the data is denied.