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I don't think BTRFS has all the features they want. One thing you can do with APFS is do an upgrade of an HFS+ partition to APFS. That might be difficult with B
by tjl 10y ago
I don't think BTRFS has all the features they want. One thing you can do with APFS is do an upgrade of an HFS+ partition to APFS. That might be difficult with BTRFS.
You don't necessarily need snapshots on a watch, but I can see it coming in useful on a phone when you're editing pictures and video.
Snapshots on a watch could be useful for system recovery. Say something went wrong during an update you could potentially use the snapshot to revert to a previous version.
- shmerl 10y agoFilesysytem snapshots are useful for recovery, but it's a very powerful mechanism for it. I.e. I think for a watch it's an overkill. On the other hand, computers are gradually moving towards miniaturization, so I suppose all this really is quite transitory, and soon enough all such considerations wills simply be irrelevant.
- Dylan16807 10y agoBTRFS can upgrade from ext4 by slotting itself into free space and marking the old metadata as a special snapshot. The same thing should work on other filesystems with few new challenges.
- cyphar 10y agoSupport for that has been dropped within Btrfs AFAIK. Also, "upgrading a filesystem in place" is more of a lottery than a feature that people should actually use. So many bad things can happen.
- Dylan16807 10y agoWell I did it a month ago, on a reasonably-updated system, at least. The main point is that upgrading "in-place" does not require any of the metadata to be in the same place between old and new filesystem. With a mildly flexible destination filesystem, the old filesystem can stay there until you're completely sure the conversion is a success. You end up with two read-only filesystems sharing a partition, and you choose which one to go forward with. Cancelling at any point is trivial, even if the conversion process crashes.