Btrfs-progs For Linux

Btrfs is an open source Copy-on-Write file system designed especially for Linux operating system and aimed at implementing advanced features, while focusing on easy administration, repair, and fault tolerance.

Initially developed by Oracle, the Btrfs filesystem features extent based file storage (2^64 max file size), space efficient packing of small files and indexed directories, dynamic inode allocation, writable snapshots, subvolumes, object level striping and mirroring, and data checksums.

It features strong integration with device mapper, supporting multiple devices, online filesystem check, very fast offline filesystem check, efficient incremental backup, as well as file system mirroring.

Because Btrfs is a filesystem, not a program with which a user can interact, the Btrfs-progs tool has been created. It provides users with a collection of powerful command-line utilities that help them to create new Btrfs file systems, check the integrity of an existing partition formatted with the Btrfs filesystem, create snapshots of Btrfs partitions, as well as to tune Btrfs partitions.

Believe it or not, Btrfs-progs is the only tool to interact with the Btrfs filesystem. This means that, if you want to create a new Btrfs partition, you will have to install the “btrfs-progs” package from the default software repositories of your Linux kernel-based operating system.

The command-line tools included in the Btrfs-progs package are as follow: btrfs, btrfs-debug-tree, btrfs-map-logical, btrfstune, btrfsck, btrfs-find-root, btrfs-select-super, btrfs-zero-log, btrfs-convert, btrfs-image and btrfs-show-super.

Even if the Btrfs-progs package is not available on your Linux distribution, you can install it by using the source archive, which must be configured and compiled prior to installation. Both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures are supported at this time.