Complete Conversion from ext4 to Btrfs on Arch Linux (and other Linux Distros)

Btrfs is a file-system that touts many improvements over traditionally simple file systems like ext4. Such as but not limited to: Snapshots, and file error corruption detection and recovery

Thing is if you’ve already got an installation it’d be a pain to reinstall everything just to switch file systems; so let’s convert it 🙂

First we need to boot from a live-system eg: CD or USB, we’ll be using https://endeavouros.com/ here but any distro that comes with btrfs-convert utility should work.

Next you’ll need to find the partition that you’ve installed the OS to,

sudo su
fdisk -l

In my case its on /dev/sda3 for root partition and /dev/sda4 for home partition

The next step is to check the filesystem for corruption, this can be done using the fsck utility.

fsck /dev/sda3
fsck /dev/sda4

If it’s clean then you’re good to continue, otherwise repair the partition first

Now lets do the actual conversion, this may take a long time and possibly crash if the volume is very big (but is reversible):

btrfs-convert /dev/sda3
btrfs-convert /dev/sda4

In my case it completed successfully, so next lets mount and chroot into our OS

mount /dev/sda3 /mnt
mount -t proc none /mnt/proc
mount -t sysfs none /mnt/sys
mount -o bind /dev /mnt/dev
mount -o bind /dev/pts /mnt/dev/pts 
modprobe efivarfs
chroot /mnt bash
mount -t efivarfs efivarfs /sys/firmware/efi/efivars

Now we need to see what the filesystem uuid is for our new filesystem

blkid

In our case we can see that our /dev/sda3 has a UUID of 5bb0773c-86b0-40ca-b6f9-e0eb5dd6193a and our /dev/sda4 has a UUID of d81e1f4d-4c6e-46bb-a6ac-05e65d369e9f so those what we will use

Next lets modify our fstab to match something like this (remember to change the file-system from ext4 to btrfs in the next column)

nano /etc/fstab

Next we will need to rebuild grub, first mount the EFI folder (in our case its /dev/sda1)

mount -t auto /dev/sda1 /efi

Next lets detect the operating systems on the root file-system

os-prober

Copy them to grub

grub-mkconfig > /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Now lets install grub

grub-install --efi-directory=/efi --target=x86_64-efi /dev/sda

Last but not least we may need to rebuild the initramfs (note that you may have to reboot into fallback initramfs if this command doesn’t work in chroot and run it there)

mkinitcpio -P
exit
reboot

If all went well we should have a working Btrfs installation now 🙂

and we didn’t need to re-install our programs 😛

Assuming things went well lets delete the conversion image since we don’t need it anymore (optional – saves space).

btrfs subvolume delete /ext2_saved

Manual Method: How to easily create and mount a snapshot

btrfs subvolume snapshot / @

Next we need to find out the subvolume id of this new subvolume

sudo btrfs subvolume show /@ | grep "Subvolume ID"

btrfs subvol set-default 425 /

Reboot, and in order to go back we can just mount the previous volume

btrfs subvol set-default 5 /

Automated Method:

If you don’t feel like managing the snapshots yourself, you can always use snapshot manager like snapper:

yay -S snapper snap-sync snap-pac snapper-gui-git
sudo snapper create-config /
sudo snapper list
sudo snapper-gui

See also:

http://snapper.io/tutorial.html and https://github.com/ricardomv/snapper-gui