Switching Your Enhance Backup Server from BTRFS to Ext4 – The Easy Way: Page 2 - Enhance Control Panel

Switching Your Enhance Backup Server from BTRFS to Ext4 – The Easy Way

xyzulu

xyzulu awk '{print $1}' /folders.txt | xargs -I {} mkdir -p {}

Small typo, correct version: awk '{print $1}' folders.txt | xargs -I {} mkdir -p {} not /folder.txt.. in any case if you know what this all means you'd work it all out pretty easily.

JohnB nothing documented.. and it's not something that is needed either (changing from btrfs to ext4).

A bit of drama and scaremongering perhaps going on.. at least that is just my view. The perception that Enhance admin requires third party tools/guides to successfully manage things is also not a view I have. Upgrade to v12.. you can deal with this backup partition file system issue later.. it's not going to cause any immediate issues now.

The actual change is:
From release notes: Backup role can now use a file system other than btrfs.
Translation: Enhance no longer requires btrfs or any particular filesystem for that matter, for Enhance backups

cPFence Enhance v12 marks the end of BTRFS for backups, and it's time to switch to Ext4.

A little misleading and click-bait/self promotion/SEO building don't you think? (since your guide is a link to your own site rather than an actual guide here on the forum)

cPFence

xyzulu A little misleading and click-bait/self promotion/SEO building don't you think? (since your guide is a link to your own site rather than an actual guide here on the forum)

No, it's not. That’s our technical opinion on the matter—BTRFS is likely to cause issues and shouldn't be used with new backup system. If you don’t agree, that’s fine. Let’s just wait and see once Twest and others upgrade and test it in production. If it works, great, but most likely, that won’t be the case.

Even you were originally planning to stick with BTRFS and later changed your mind—which was a wise decision.

As for the guide, if it were easy to copy the full post here, we would, but we’ve tried before, and the formatting was horrible. If you don’t find this thread useful, feel free to ignore it.

xyzulu

cPFence BTRFS and later changed your mind—which was a wise decision.

For the record we noted when there were approximately 10 concurrent backups in progress BTRFS was close to 100% disk io on v12. When we sat down, consulted with Enhance, and looked at how simple it was to switch to ext4 it seemed an easy solution.

Offtopic:
I respect your knowledge and server admin skills, even your product.. but I would prefer to contribute along with you here on the forums rather than have to visit your personal site to see your suggestions/tips.. and personally I feel that is how Enhance should encourage people to contribute. (and I believe the community guidelines makes this clear too)

rdbf

cPFence BTRFS is likely to cause issues and shouldn't be used with new backup system

What kind of issues though? What unique feature of EXT4 is being used by Enhance Backup that BTRFS lacks? What part of BTRFS will be sub-par with it?

BTRFS still has advantages, like easy compression as a mount option, actual snapshots in case you want to backup the backups, data integrity checksums/self-healing and lots of things you can do while mounted (resize....). EXT4 is very solid, but what does it bring to the table besides being ol' reliable?

cPFence

JohnB How are they handling incremental backups now? Is it their own system? Where is this documented?

The new system simply uses rsync --link-dest for de-duplication. It’s efficient, but some bugs still need to be ironed out.

cPFence

xyzulu For the record we noted when there were approximately 10 concurrent backups in progress BTRFS was close to 100% disk io on v12. When we sat down, consulted with Enhance, and looked at how simple it was to switch to ext4 it seemed an easy solution.

What you faced is just one of several potential issues that are likely to happen for Enhance users running BTRFS at scale with the new system. Let’s wait and see how things unfold in the next few weeks.

xyzulu I respect your knowledge and server admin skills, even your product.. but I would prefer to contribute along with you here on the forums rather than have to visit your personal site to see your suggestions/tips.. and personally I feel that is how Enhance should encourage people to contribute. (and I believe the community guidelines makes this clear too)

You know I contribute a lot to this community, and I genuinely enjoy doing so. But copying full, long guides and formatting them properly in this forum is very difficult, as you probably already know. The Enhance team understands this, which is why they allowed it in recent months. If they decide they no longer want external guides shared here, we’re totally fine with that.

8Dweb

xyzulu I fail to understand why this is an issue. You do seem rather perturbed over the external link, but as others have said in the past and in this forum, there Is no acceptable way to make that post here.

Frankly, so what if they link to their own site. They have been one of the best contributors to our community. If you do not like or want to use their expertise, or product, fine, but I for one hope they do well with the value-add.

As for the backups, I have read every single post, some many times, about this since release. I am still not convinced the backup system is ready for us to move to v.12 since there was yet another post this morning form Alyssa that more dedup issues are pending a fix.

None-the-less thanks to you and all the others who have already jumped over to v. 12. That willingness (which we do not have, yet) is certainly pushing the product to a more stable release.

JohnB

cPFence What you faced is just one of several potential issues that are likely to happen for Enhance users running BTRFS at scale with the new system. Let’s wait and see how things unfold in the next few weeks.

Not arguing any point but for my own knowledge what issues have you seen besides more IO and CPU usage?

As for the external link and editing in this forum:

The editor here (like more forums) is garbage and if there is a typo you can't edit it later (which is good to prevent drama but not great for tech documents). Hope you keep up the great content here, its appreciated and always a good read!

cPFence

rdbf

If you only have a handful of sites or a small amount of data, it won’t cause noticeable issues. But at scale, you’ll start seeing problems like the ones xyzulu faced, which led to switching to EXT4, things like slowdowns and high I/O usage.

BTRFS’s real strength is in btrfs send/receive functionalities, and we’re actually big fans of it. Honestly, I wish Enhance hadn’t removed it in the first place. But when using rsync with large amounts of data, EXT4 is the way to go.

cPFence

JohnB

Thanks! Glad you found it useful.

As mentioned earlier, for personal sites and VPS owners, there are no issues at all. But for hosting companies handling large amounts of data and taking backups 2–3 times a day, you may start seeing slowdowns and high I/O usage. If you have a powerful dedicated server for backups, you’ll probably be fine.

rdbf

JohnB you can't edit it later

Only as long as nobody has replied yet. I'm more worried about the Ctrl+F function being crap because of the 'partial' loading of the thread, and the internal search function being cumbersome as well.

Zoinkies

Is a side affect of this large storage space? I’m seeing the new backup server is way more storage than it did with v11

JohnB

rdbf yeah if someone even likes your post. So if someone points out an issue it's hard to correct

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