Hi all,

First of all, thank you Pat and the crew for the new release.

Not sure if I've missed something somewhere but when I install 64 14.1 (torrent download) choosing Quick format and then btrfs, it doesn't actually format the partition. It quickly proceeds and all the files install but the old files from the previous installation are still there.

What have I missed?

Edit: It does the same with Slow format and btrfs.

Slackware Linux Help

IIRC, by default btrfs does not "delete" anything, it just hard links the file you try to delete into the recovery tree and creates a new file. (Actually, this is done at the inode level, not the file level.) That's why it's called a "copy-on-write" file system.

Anyhow, formatting (or reformatting) a btrfs will not actually erase the "old" files unless you use the administrative tools to do so. (Which you need to do fairly frequently unless your btrfs spans a large drive, and your "active files" are only a small part of the drive.)

Note: I stopped using btrfs when a 2Tb drive, formatted as btrfs, reported that it was "full," but df reported only 200Gb in use on the drive. (This was at least a year ago, and things may be better now, but I decided that frequent backup was all I needed for a simple, one user, home system.)

BtrFS is generally recommended anymore from my knowledge only for user accounts due to how Copy-On-Write works.

You should be using something like EXT3/4, JFS, or ReiserFS for your root file system, EXT2 for /boot, and a different partition like BtrFS for your /home/(user accounts) for redundancy and backup capability purposes.

I think ZFS allows for deletion of files without administrator access after a certain time frame has passed, but ZFS is not included by default for any Linux distribution due to licensing.

Btrfs will not be production-ready until Slackware 16 I think.

BtrFS unfortunately as jtsn said, is still in the testing/experimental stages. It's really not ready for mainstream usage. Actually few doubt it will ever be ready, and that work needs to be done to get ZFS license compatible with GPL.

Oracle has been working on it as a replacement for ZFS which is now under the Illumos Foundation's control, but ZFS is still far superior, however even still at this time, ZFSOnLinux, which has been porting ZFS to Linux, is still licensed under the CDDL, which as mentioned previously, isn't GPL compatible so no distributions can include it by default, and plus I think the code is in need of an update to work with the recent 3.x series of kernels.

Your best bet would be to use JFS, EXT4, or ReiserFS at this time.

I have used this broken down partition method as one of mine in recent times.

EXT2 - /boot
EXT4 - /(root)
JFS - /home

However, mostly I stick to a single EXT4 /(root) partition for all files.

Thank you. That's what I thought: PEBKAC

I went with ext4 anyway. Initially I just wanted to try btrfs. I read about ZFS and it does sound really interesting. It's a pity it can't (yet) be included with Linux by default.