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rmdegennaro
January 24th, 2013, 01:27 AM
What I did was "routine" for me, but perhaps a bit weird otherwise. I had two 1.5TB HD's that I was using to test/play around with BTRFS. They were formated to about 1.3TB and mounted on one Ubuntu system at /home/Storage/BTRFSTemp. I loaded them up with files and what not, taking up about 1TB.

After working with it a bit, I decided to reload my regular Kubuntu 12.04 desktop using them as the main drives. I had planned for this, and left empty partitions on each drive. So each drive has 4 partitions, 1GB, 2GB, 2GB and rest the BTRFS partitions. I also moved all the directories to a directory called "Old_harddrive" on the root of the partition.

During installation, I set the following:

SDA1 = /boot (ext3, formatted)
SDA2 = swap
SDA3 = swap
SDA4 = / (btrfs, not formatted)
SDB1 = swap
SDB2 = swap
SDB3 = swap

Then afterwards I added SDB4 to the BTRFS volume. I forget the exact command. Then I did:
btrfs filesystem balance / Only after that did I go to look for the files. But I can't find them. :confused:

When I do:
btrfs filesystem show I get:

Total devices 2 FS bytes used 1.11TB
devid 1 size 1.36TB used 1.11TB path /dev/sda4
devid 2 size 1.36TB used 1.11TB path /dev/sdb4
And a "df" using btrfs says used is 1.11TB.

When I do:
du -h -d1 / everything looks normal except that I see 9.9GB total for the installation. That is typical for a brand new installation (with other stuff I've installed since).

If I try a locate command on "old" with all possible case combinations (maybe I fat-fingered something), the directory does not show up.

I'm at a loss. Maybe I don't understand BTRFS enough and lost the files. Not a big deal, because I just copied them from other systems. But I'd like to know how I messed up, and perhaps the installer should warn people before they get themselves into a fix with real data.

So anyways, any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

rmdegennaro
January 30th, 2013, 03:30 AM
Did a bit of rereading and looking. The *buntu installation process creates subvolumes on the BTRFS partition. There is the "@" subvolume for / (root) and then "@home" subvolume for /home. All my files were in the main partition, without subvolume. If I mount the partition without any subvolume arguments, I see my old files.

Maybe not a bug in the installer, but I should check the installer (especially new versions) to see if there was a warning I missed. Because this is non-obvious and I'm not sure non-techies would figure it out.

Interesting side note, the subvolumes seem to be directories in the main volume. Kinda cool...