Giver of skulls

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Joined 101 years ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 1923

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  • I take advantage of the free disk space savings and don’t worry about disk space much. I’ll clear out my download directory and maybe some caches when my disk usage grows beyond 80% (as reported in GUI tools). Running duperemove across my drive every now and then also tends to help a lot without deleting anything.

    If I do run out of space, there are a few interactive terminal tools that’ll point out the biggest files so I can delete them and save some space in a pinch. I practice, I just don’t really think about it much.





  • df is the standard command line tool to see how much of your disk space is free.

    The problems happen in GUI tools too. Most of the time, they work out in your favour (you think you only have 10GB left but you can put 15GB away) but after a lot of deletes you may “lose” some space until you do a rebalance even through you’d think looking at the stats that you have plenty of space.

    Another issue is that file managers showing you a file’s size often don’t know about compression. You can store a large text file with standard compression on a disk and have it be reported as 100MB while it only takes up a megabyte of space. You can end up deleting a whole bunch of “hundred megabyte files” and save basically no disk space. Other file types, like images and video, often do represent the real size as they’re already compressed, making some 100MB files larger than others. If you don’t enable compression, you won’t have this problem, or course.

    GUI tools also often don’t know about CoW. If you copy a file on BTRFS, the copy action should be instant and take up maybe a couple hundred bytes for the new metadata. To your file manager it looks like you have two 3GB movie files, but in practice they’re just names pointing to the same directory. You can get petabytes of used disk space this way by just making more and more copies, even though your actual disk space barely grows. This also means deleting files may not clear up as much disk space as you’d like.





  • I found both sides rather aggressive to be honest. The implication that the use of “he” implies that the author assumes every user is male comes with an implied accusation of some form of misogyny. The aggressive defence again at the implication went too far, but the implication of malice was unnecessary, especially for an unknown outsider butting in.

    Furthermore, the “generic he” has also been acceptable English for centuries, and has only been starting to be phased out in the past few decades. In high school, some of my English study materials still came from thirty years before, and certainly didn’t contain gender neutral words like “postperson”. Singular “they” may have been around since the 14th century but that doesn’t mean it was commonplace. My native language doesn’t have an equivalent for the singular they, so I’ll probably use “he” in wrong places. Accusing me of not considering female users because I’m not a native English speaker certainly won’t make me want to help you (though I’d probably just ignore you rather than shut you down; then again, I’m not recovering from substance addiction like the original author was back in the day, so that’s not hard for me to do).


  • Actually, I want to backup my system as I’m new to Linux, there is that I will break the system.

    Then you will need to also include most if not all system packages. You can exclude your home folder if you want.

    Note that there are big differences between how Timeshift works on btrfs or on anything else. BTRFS snapshots allow something called “copy on write”, basically allowing the system to make a “copy” of a file that references the same data as another, and from that moment only tracking changes. That way, you can instantly create snapshots of entire drives, and keep dozens of snapshots without risking running out of storage. I’ve got my system set up to make a snapshot every time software updates are installed and the biggest snapshot I’ve seen was about 45GB (it was a snapshot from before upgrading Ubuntu 22.04 to 24.04 and included a few virtual machine and ML models). My daily apt upgrades generate snapshots of about 100MB but I can still roll back the moment I need to. I can even select an older snapshot in my Grub boot menu in case my bootloader dies.

    The rsync based approach used on ext4 and other filesystems isn’t that flexible. You’ll get snapshots, but each file needs to be processed individually. This means you need to make sure to close down programs before making snapshots or you’ll risk corruption. The disk space savings are also more limited; filesystems like ext4 will still have almost 0 overhead for files that haven’t been changed between two snapshots, but if you change a single bit in the middle of a 100MB file, chances are rsync will create a fresh copy (whereas btrfs would only store an extra extent, usually 4KB, which is the smallest unit the filesystem will let you control).

    Restoring snapshots using rsync requires copying/linking files back, and can’t be done transparently. This means you can’t boot a previous version of the system like on btrfs, you’ll need to boot into recovery mode, restore the snapshot manually, and reboot.

    I’m afraid about the compatibility of BTRFS ( not like system drive need any compatibility ). Does it have a good community support as ext4?

    Support is mature enough that it’ll Just Work in most cases. With some edge cases, like disk usage statistics not being accurate, because tools don’t realise files can be partially deduplicated or compressed, let alone taking subvolume quotas into account. In most cases, the more fancy features you enable, the more older software will act a bit funny.

    I believe Fedora has picked it as the default for a few years now. Haven’t checked, though.

    ?

    Tools like df and other file system monitors only support very rudimentary disk usage statistics, even when certain ext4 features are involved. There are a bunch of methods in which btrfs can seem full, but still have plenty of space, or it can seem like there are gigabytes of space left but the volume is so unbalanced that that space isn’t actually usable. There are also about three types of data stores that can technically get full (though your rarely run into that). Usually, you can claim back a chunk of storage after a year or two by rebalancing and defragmenting the file system, especially if you use advanced features like snapshotting. I believe there are rolls to automatically run these operations as well.

    These issues seem to come up. Most when you’ve nearly filled the FS to the brim. Keeping 10% free seems to prevent most of them from ever popping up.

    There are a few other edge cases as well (like how you should disable compression on swap files and virtual machine images, and how you may want to disable copy on write and snapshots on them as well for performance reasons) but they’re more niche. There are a bunch of really cool features as well (like how you can send a snapshot over the network in the form of only the difference since the version before, making network disk backups tiny). You’re not that likely to run into any of them, but the project website has everything documented if you’re interested.



  • You can convert a running ext4 system into BTRFS and even move back to ext4, but to optimise the file system there are quite a few tricks to run as well. They come down to “remove the ext4 metadata (can’t go back after that), defragment, balance, maybe defragment again” and there are tools out there that make this stuff doable though the GUI, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that approach I novices.

    The cleanest switch would be to reinstall. Not just because of the steps above, but also to make sure the right subvolumes are set up with the right properties. This too can be done from a (mostly) running system, but it’s an absolute pain in the ass to have to do manually, especially if you’re not an expert in command line stuff.

    ext4 works fine if you don’t want to deal with all of this, but you’ll have to keep an eye on things like backup sizes just a bit more often


  • If you can’t take advantage of Timeshift’s BTRFS support, you’ll probably need to keep an eye on disk space regardless.

    All the .deb files are installed across system directories like /usr and /etc. If you only want backups of your files, just exclude everything outside /home and your data drive. This makes it more difficult to recover from a failed upgrade Windows System Restore style (as you exclude the system components from the backups) but hopefully you’ll never need that (or will be willing to reinstall and restore from backup when failure does happen). You may also want to exclude folders like $HOME/.cache and $HOME/.var if they’re present on your system. I think Chrome puts some of its cache in $HOME/.config as well, though I’d back up most .config folders myself.

    If your storage is that limited and you’re already familiar with Timeshift, you may want to consider switching to BTRFS. It’s not very friendly when it’s almost full, but compression and deduplication can save a lot of disk space, especially with tools like Timeshift. Other filesystems also offer these features, but Timeshift doesn’t make use of anything but BTRFS as far as I know.


  • I get skin irritations regardless of how clean my smart watch is after my wrist gets wet. Not entirely sure why, but something to consider if cleaning doesn’t help.

    Check the manual to see if there are specific cleaning instructions. You don’t want to accidentally damage any rubber seals with soap that’s too aggressive or scrub off a protective coating somewhere.

    My watch came with instructions to wipe it down with clean water, then some standard disinfectant alcohol. If that doesn’t work, soap-free detergent is recommended (I didn’t know that existed in any mild form?), so I’m guessing my watch really doesn’t like soap.



  • You can probably just swap the SSD if your dock uses a protocol that Windows’ bootloader can understand. Some USB 3.2/Thunderbolt docks just seem to work with Windows, albeit a bit slower because of hubs and such that aren’t always top quality.

    Just try it. It either boots or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, it’s probably a massive pain to get working in the dock (best of luck to you if you’ll still try).

    You should also check for updates/update your new SSD’s firmware, probably under Windows. Not a lot of brands make Linux installers and the automatic tools that check compatibility generally aren’t part of the Linux firmware downloads.

    Re: file transfer: make sure you have your Bitlocker recovery key, or disable encryption on the Windows partition so you can access it in Linux. Other than that, just copy over the files. Linux can read Windows’ file system just fine. If you load the right drivers, Windows can also read file systems like btrfs or ext4 just fine.


  • A lot of people are afraid of systemd expanding because systemd handles a lot of stuff, so distros are likely to support it rather than the mishmash of tools they personally prefer. It all started with the System-V/Upstart replacement and now very few distros have the patience to customise and roll out the 90s style service management anymore. Their preferences used to align with the mainstream, but no longer do these days, and that causes friction.

    This process pushes people who prefer old tools to fringe distros, and newer software is less likely to work on their setups. They’re still free to use whatever system they like, of course, but the burden for developing and maintaining daemon management scripts is now on their fringe distro or themselves if their distro doesn’t have anything yet. I’d find that pretty annoying too, especially with how convoluted many older system management scripts are and how many moving parts are typically involved. Plus, some stuff like socket activation can’t even be done with some of the older init systems so people have to find alternatives.

    I doubt anyone reeling against run0 was ever going to consider it anyway.