Btrfs and balance

I see the messages about doing a balance? I am new on here and have not installed a lot of apps but I will soon. So is it best to start the balance now or wait until I have loaded more apps. Any tips or ideas about this will be most welcome

gary

you only need to balance only once a month or when you remove a lot of stuff to reclaim space

or when you resize btrfs partitions or add multiple drives using btrfs device add command

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To find out whether you need to run balance, just have a close look at the output of
sudo btrfs filesystem usage /path

Overall:
    Device size:		     476.44GiB
    Device allocated:		 252.04GiB
    Device unallocated:		 224.40GiB
    Device missing:		     0.00B
    Used:			         224.00GiB
    Free (estimated):		 250.86GiB

And compare the difference between "unallocated" and "free", and "allocated" and "used". Snapshots can play a big part in this.
The higher the difference, the more it is likely that a balance operation can help.

You should not run a full balance, since it will rewrite almost everything, potentially leading to SSD degradation. A factor of 50% might be a good starting point.

EDIT: after a balance of 60% on the above, I get this:

Overall:
    Device size:		     476.44GiB
    Device allocated:		 245.04GiB
    Device unallocated:		 231.40GiB
    Used:			         223.99GiB
    Free (estimated):		 251.86GiB

Notice the difference.

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Here is my initial information:

Overall:
Device size: 876.39GiB
Device allocated: 18.02GiB
Device unallocated: 858.36GiB
Device missing: 876.39GiB
Used: 14.49GiB
Free (estimated): 859.42GiB (min: 430.24GiB)
Data ratio: 1.00
Metadata ratio: 2.00
Global reserve: 41.55MiB (used: 0.00B)
Multiple profiles: no

Data,single: Size:14.01GiB, Used:12.95GiB (92.44%)

Metadata,DUP: Size:2.00GiB, Used:786.94MiB (38.42%)

System,DUP: Size:8.00MiB, Used:16.00KiB (0.20%)

And a big thank you to both of you

gary