 So, somebody wrote a program that converts, in-place, an #NTFS volume into #btrfs. It even keeps an image of the original NTFS volume as a file in the resulting btrfs volume. This can be used to undo the conversion or deleted to free up space and make the conversion permanent. That is absolutely wild. 11 comments
@argv_minus_one i ran btrfs-scrub on a 128GB disk converted from reiserfs and it said it was scrubbing 16GB. panicked until i saw df output then remembered that btrfs grows the file system as needed. Yeah, there's also an in-place conversion from ext2/3/4. I seem to recall reading that btrfs is very flexible about where all the on-disk structures are located, which makes it unusually amenable to in-place conversion from other file systems. @argv_minus_one this would be great for people who've recently moved to linux and are on the edge regarding formatting their external ntfs drive :ThumbsUpCool: Linux can already mount NTFS. This is more for people who've decided to take the plunge. @argv_minus_one@mastodon.sdf.org Ive wanted to like #btrfs for so long but every time i use it something goes wrong and i just go back to #zfs I think i just have bad luck :pepe_hands: @argv_minus_one also think i remember seeing a project letting windows run entirely off of btrfs, meaning you could quite possibly convert a windows system to a btrfs filesystem in-place  @pearl@fedi.rrr.sh @doskel@masto.doskel.net @argv_minus_one@mastodon.sdf.org i see you with "windows booting from btrfs" and i raise a linux install with ntfs on the root partition |
Gregory's Server
Btrfs is copy-on-write, so keeping an image of the original NTFS does *not* involve duplicating every file on it. The blocks of the NTFS image are shared with the files on the new btrfs.
Which, again, is wild. One file's contents can be *part of* another, much larger file's contents, without duplication (until one of them is written to).