Re: SLES 11 SP4: can't mount btrfs

["Austin S. Hemmelgarn" <ahferroin7@gmail.com>]

On 2017-10-24 09:28, Lentes, Bernd wrote:
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Austin S. Hemmelgarn [mailto:ahferroin7@gmail.com]
>> Sent: Tuesday, October 24, 2017 1:53 PM
>> To: Adam Borowski <kilobyte@angband.pl>; Lentes, Bernd
>> <bernd.lentes@helmholtz-muenchen.de>
>> Cc: Btrfs ML <linux-btrfs@vger.kernel.org>
>> Subject: Re: SLES 11 SP4: can't mount btrfs
>>
>> I think partimage _might_ have BTRFS support by now, and if so, that's
>> likely to be the best you can get for quite some time.
> 
> Unfortunately not: http://www.partimage.org/Supported-Filesystems/
> 
>>> It depends on what you use subvolumes for.
>> And this is the important part.  If you're just using them to segregate
>> workloads (like I do), or exclude things from snapshots (like I used to do
>> when I was using snapshots for backups), then any old backup program is
>> fine as long as you know enough to replicate the subvolume layout when
>> extracting (if you need the same layout that is).  I'm actually working on
>> a
>> script to automate this for file-level backups (stuff like Amanda, Bareos,
>> and borgbackup), but I don't have anything ready to share yet.>
> 
> There seems to be no backup solution which supports BTRFS in a way that I
> can just restore the complete partition with all subvolumes, snapshots ?
> That's bad. A fs can also get corrupt in certain circumstances.
> I'd like to have a solution which offers me the possibility to restore a
> root partition in a reasonable time (some hours maximum), completely. Not
> doing many stuff before/afterwards. It seems that's not possible withBTRFS.
A short-term alternative, if you've got a full backup of what SLES 
mounts as /, is to run a regular install, boot the system, and then 
extract the backup on top of /.  It's not perfect, but it should work 
well enough.

As mentioned, I'm working on a script to handle this for tools like 
Amanda and Bareos.  I plan to send a message out on the list when that's 
sufficiently working that I think it's safely usable, I can make sure 
you're on CC for that message as well if you like.  I hoped to have 
something later this week, but things are busier than expected at work 
this week, so it might be a while.
> 
> And Btrfs check is still limited in what it can do.