Re: Preserving the home on btrfs
On Mon, Aug 24, 2020 at 1:18 PM Brandon Nielsen <nielsenb(a)jetfuse.net> wrote:
On 8/24/20 2:12 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 24, 2020 at 4:40 AM Alessio <alciregi(a)posteo.net> wrote:
>>
>> Hello.
>> I was performing some random test of F33.
>> There is a thing that I can't understand.
>> If I reinstall the system on an disk where I already installed Fedora
>> 33 before, and I want to preserve the content of the home subvolume, is
>> this feasible? I tried various things using Anaconda, but I'm still not
>> able to figure out how to achieve this task.
>
> It is possible.
>
> Using Custom partitioning UI, I suggest in order:
>
> 1. Create /boot/efi or BIOS Boot mount point (can be reused or reformatted)
> 2. Create /boot mount point (can be reused or reformatted)
> 3. Create / mount point (this is required to be a new subvolume)
> 4. Locate the home subvolume you want, the current UI it's pretty easy
> to find if there are no snapshots; if there are many snapshots, you'll
> have to look around for it.
> 5. Click on that subvolume, and on the right hand side at the top,
> find Mount Point field; type in /home; click Update Settings button.
> 6. Click Done
>
> This is a rough draft :) I'm going by memory.
>
Is the "I would like to make additional space available" checkbox going
to grow subvolume support? Right now your only option is to blow away
the entire btrfs volume from a previous install.
Not yet.
That option is only for Automatic partitioning and it has no reuse
capability no matter what storage stack layout there is. The current
thinking is that it's already too many choices and UI for users, and
it was proposed to be removed at one point. But because it has a
fairly simple interface for resizing NTFS, and dual boot with Windows
is important, the proposal to remove this UI was abandoned.
One advantage of coming up with proper naming convention (or xattr)
for subvolumes, to "tag" them as serving an unambiguous purpose:
snapshot and rollback regime policy is top on that list, but also it'd
be possible for automatic partitioning in to offer some minimal UI to
"reuse home - create new home" option. It might be a while. Right now
it's Custom or Advanced-Custom UI's for reusing such things.
--
Chris Murphy