Btrfs balance crashed now no free space on disk

[Bro]

You can use any filesystem you want as long as it’s btrfs.

[BluishHumility]

My guess would be the metadata usage got jacked up so high from all the hacking around you did on this new drive in this thread and this thread. Instead of just copying the files over in a normal manner there was a lot of…experimentation.

For example:

@zany130

I did a fresh install of garuda linux on a new disk but I want to transfer my @home volume from my old disk. As well as installed packages (pacman, aur, flatpak)

@zany130

I at first tried to just do a cp -r but the problem is I have some files under my old home that our not owned by my user such as waydroid files.

So I think it would be better to just clone the whole @home from my old disk to the new one.

@zany130

but I couldn’t get it to work. the furthest I got was the second step of sending the snapshot of the @home volume to my new disk but it just hangs there and then eventualy black screens

@zany130

rom what I have been reading I can’t just dd either as that would clone my whole btrfs partition not just the @home volume. I don’t want to do this because the root volume of my btrfs partition is messed up and unboottable so I would just end up with the same broken install on my new disk

@zany130

hmm my issue seems to be that im running out of space on my new disk when sending the snapshot to my new disk… Don’t know why I should have enough free space on my new disk

@zany130

what I want to do is create a readonly snapshot of my broken install’s @home

then send it somewhere on my new disk.

then create a writable snapshot of that snapshot at /home/

@zany130

I had part of my old home on my new disk so it was prob running out of space because of that (i thought the snapshot would be compressed and not be the whole size)

@zany130

no left overs from my previous cp -r /mnt/broken/@home/zany130 /home/

the thing is I have some steam games there so the whole home folder is like 800GB

I don’t think the filesystem is the issue.

If you do a reinstall and just copy your stuff over with cp -a or rsync -a instead of all the tomfoolery with snapshots, subvolumes, partition cloning, etc my guess is you will have all your stuff but the metadata will remain modestly sized.

[Bro]

@BluishHumility

tomfoolery

Voted: Word o’ The Day.

Definition of TOMFOOLERY

[zany130]

The problem is I can’t because I get a permission error when I try to copy my waydroid settings. (there owned by root I believe)

That’s why I decided cloning the disk would be a Better solution than just cp -a

Also btrfs already hosed my old disk which is what led to all of this in the first place. (Old disk is working perfectly fine as a Windows install.

I think I might have to do a reinstall though and a cp -a and just forget about waydroid

Found this but it’s old so don’t know if it’s still the case

https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/FAQ#Can_I_change_metadata_block_size_without_recreating_the_filesytem.3F

[BluishHumility]

@zany130

The problem is I can’t because I get a permission error when I try to copy my waydroid settings. (there owned by root I believe)

This did not work for you because you were using cp -r instead of cp -a. If you run sudo cp -r then all the files will inherit root ownership (which will mess up all your “normal” files), and if you do not use sudo then the copy will fail for root-owned files and directories.

Instead, run like this:

sudo cp -a /copy/from /copy/to

cp -a preserves file ownership, and other file properties as well. So you can run it as root, allowing it to capture all your root-owned files, but also your user-owned files will retain their correct ownership and permissions.

Other than files and directories in /home, and any configs you want to keep out of /etc, there shouldn’t be much else that is copied. Packages installed with a package manager are better off reinstalled to avoid introducing a partial upgrade.

[BluishHumility]

@zany130

One thing I am confused on is why a balance can cause you to LOSE disk space. From my understanding balance can help reclaim lost disk space when it is fragmented (which can happen when deleting a lot of data eg snapshots that held lot of diff data).

But it shouldn’t cause you to lose space correct?

As soon as I ran the balance operation I noticed I started losing tens of GB in disk space and it keeps going down.

It turns out this is a known regression in the 6.7 kernel: [6.7 regression] [BISECTED] 28270e25c69a causes overallocation of metadata space

I apologize for suggesting it could be caused by all the atypical disk operations preceding the issue. Now, I am pretty sure that suggestion was incorrect. All the tomfoolery () or otherwise should not matter.

A simple workaround for anyone else running into this issue would be to switch to the LTS kernel for now.

[tuxcomss]

@BluishHumility

A simple workaround for anyone else running into this issue would be to switch to the LTS kernel for now.

Thank you for the information. Switched to Xanmod. It has version 6.6.14.