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.
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You really should backup your data anyways, and if you do, then you might as well nuke your current drive and recreate it as btrfs inside the LUKS container. You shouldn’t have to change anything with the LUKS container itself unless you want to expand/shrink storage size.
Go for it. Encryption doesn’t matter, since that’s LUKS layer.
That’s it. Do a backup before. I would go for converting from ext4 into btrfs, already did it before. Arch Wiki about converting ext4 into btrfs.
Sure you can do that, but please backup your data before attempting the conversion, in case anything goes wrong
I did this like a year ago using ‘btrfs-convert’ it was a seamless experience. It even creates a snapshot of your existing partition for backup purposes.
Always backup.
Everytime I do anything with filesystems or partitions, something goes wrong and I end up having to utilize the backup.
That’s not to say btrfs-convert won’t work; I have no idea as I’ve never used it. Maybe it will work perfectly, but at least you’ll have a backup for a fresh fs if it doesn’t.
I’d just re-format and restore from backup.
I’m using ext4 for years, in luks. What are the advantages of btrfs? Also yes do a backup, I’m always doing one on an external usb3 ssd using simple rsync.
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.
Can it repair bitrot if you’re running on a single drive?
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.
Btrfs also has transparent filesystem compression
