Btrfs To Ext4

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Hello CentOS Gurus,

I have just learned that our backup system natively supports restoring vmware VM individual files from a vmware based backup for ext3,ext4 file systems but not BTRFS and some of our VM’s run BTRFS as the root file system.

Does anyone know if it’s possible to convert BTRFS partitions to ext4?

Chris

4 thoughts on - Btrfs To Ext4

  • Does anyone know if it’s possible to convert BTRFS partitions to I think that you can convert ext to btrfs , but not the opposite.

    The cleanest way is to reinstall .

    Best Regards, Strahil Nikolov

  • Hello Everyone,

    We have two virtual machines running CentOS 7, one for file sharing and one for email.  Both base Filesystems run BTRFS.  I need to convert both filesystems over from BTRFS to ext4.

    Both guest VM’s are in a vmware environment on the same server.  The file server has 2.8 TB of space total allocated to it, 2.1 TB of total used space

    The mail server has 2TB allocated to it, and 982 GB of total used space.

    The host it is attached to has 13.97 TB of total usable space, with 3.4
    TB free.

    What steps would you go through to migrate the file systems over? Would you set up a duplicate VM and rsync data over?  Expand the capacity of the existing VM, add a new partition then move data over from one partition to another from within the same VM?

    What are your thoughts?

    —
    Christopher Wensink IS Administrator Five Star Plastics, Inc
    1339 Continental Drive Eau Claire, WI 54701
    Office: 715-831-1682
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  • Il 2021-07-02 20:26 Christopher Wensink ha scritto:

    Both options seems reasonable to me. If choosing to use the same machine, I would not expand the existing disk; rather I suggest adding a *new* disk to VM (formatting it with EXT4).

    Regards.

    —
    Danti Gionatan Supporto Tecnico Assyoma S.r.l. – http://www.assyoma.it email: g.danti@assyoma.it – info@assyoma.it GPG public key ID: FF5F32A8

  • IMO, creating a new disk also leaves you the safety of not modifying the originals so that you can fail back over if something doesn’t go well. Of course take backups as well, but being able to simply switch between drive images will make for quicker troubleshooting.