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ch-balance-filters.rst

File metadata and controls

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From kernel 3.3 onwards, BTRFS balance can limit its action to a subset of the whole filesystem, and can be used to change the replication configuration (e.g. convert data from single to RAID1).

Balance can be limited to a block group profile with the following options:

  • -d for data block groups
  • -m for metadata block groups (also implicitly applies to -s)
  • -s for system block groups

The options have an optional parameter which means that the parameter must start right after the option without a space (this is mandatory getopt syntax), like -dusage=10. Options for all block group types can be specified in one command.

A filter has the following structure: filter[=params][,filter=...]

To combine multiple filters use ,, without spaces. Example: -dconvert=raid1,soft

BTRFS can have different profiles on a single device or the same profile on multiple device.

The main reason why you want to have different profiles for data and metadata is to provide additional protection of the filesystem's metadata when devices fail, since a single sector of unrecoverable metadata will break the filesystem, while a single sector of lost data can be trivially recovered by deleting the broken file.

Before changing profiles, make sure there is enough unallocated space on existing drives to create new metadata block groups (for filesystems over 50GiB, this is 1GB * (number_of_devices + 2)).

Default profiles on BTRFS are:

  • data: single
  • metadata:
    • single devices: dup
    • multiple devices: raid1

The available filter types are:

Filter types

profiles=<profiles>
Balances only block groups with the given profiles. Parameters are a list of profile names separated by | (pipe).
usage=<percent>, usage=<range>

Balances only block groups with usage under the given percentage. The value of 0 is allowed and will clean up completely unused block groups, this should not require any new work space allocated. You may want to use usage=0 in case balance is returning ENOSPC and your filesystem is not too full.

The argument may be a single value or a range. The single value N means at most N percent used, equivalent to ..N range syntax. Kernels prior to 4.4 accept only the single value format. The minimum range boundary is inclusive, maximum is exclusive.

devid=<id>
Balances only block groups which have at least one chunk on the given device. To list devices with ids use :command:`btrfs filesystem show`.
drange=<range>
Balance only block groups which overlap with the given byte range on any device. Use in conjunction with devid to filter on a specific device. The parameter is a range specified as start..end.
vrange=<range>
Balance only block groups which overlap with the given byte range in the filesystem's internal virtual address space. This is the address space that most reports from btrfs in the kernel log use. The parameter is a range specified as start..end.
convert=<profile>

Convert each selected block group to the given profile name identified by parameters.

Note

Starting with kernel 4.5, the data chunks can be converted to/from the DUP profile on a single device.

Starting with kernel 4.6, all profiles can be converted to/from DUP on multi-device filesystems.

Warning

Bad or missing device are not detected immediately during runtime and this depends on some later event like failed write or failed transaction commit. If there's a known failing device, or a device deleted by :file:`/sys/block/<dev>/device/delete` interface, the device will be still accessed and written to.

In such case, one should not convert to a profile with lower redundancy (e.g. from RAID1 to SINGLE), as attempts to create new chunks on the new devices will cause various problems.

The proper action is to use :command:`btrfs replace` or :command:`btrfs device remove` to handle the failing/missing device first. Then convert will work with all devices correctly.

limit=<number>, limit=<range>

Process only given number of chunks, after all filters are applied. This can be used to specifically target a chunk in connection with other filters (drange, vrange) or just simply limit the amount of work done by a single balance run.

The argument may be a single value or a range. The single value N means at most N chunks, equivalent to ..N range syntax. Kernels prior to 4.4 accept only the single value format. The range minimum and maximum are inclusive.

stripes=<range>
Balance only block groups which have the given number of stripes. The parameter is a range specified as start..end. Makes sense for block group profiles that utilize striping, i.e. RAID0/10/5/6. The range minimum and maximum are inclusive.
soft

Takes no parameters. Only has meaning when converting between profiles, or When doing convert from one profile to another and soft mode is on, chunks that already have the target profile are left untouched. This is useful e.g. when half of the filesystem was converted earlier but got cancelled.

The soft mode switch is (like every other filter) per-type. For example, this means that we can convert metadata chunks the "hard" way while converting data chunks selectively with soft switch.

Profile names, used in profiles and convert are one of:

  • raid0
  • raid1
  • raid1c3
  • raid1c4
  • raid10
  • raid5
  • raid6
  • dup
  • single

The mixed data/metadata profiles can be converted in the same way, but conversion between mixed and non-mixed is not implemented. For the constraints of the profiles please refer to :doc:`mkfs.btrfs` section :ref:`PROFILES<man-mkfs-profiles>`.