snappers bite (minor rant)

OK I will admit that this is partly my fault not looking before I leap…
BUT! ( there is always a but )

Who was responsible for and then decided to put the default / partition size
on install of 13.2 at 20 Gigs???

Now normally I do my own partitioning but this tine I bought myself a
reasonable Toshiba Satellite lappy, 4 core Intel I3 with 1 TB drive, 8 Gigs
Ram, wireless, Bluetooth and Intel graphics I knew all hardware was
compatible and so thought to myself a nice little machine for running
Opensuse while on the move.

First thing was to format away MR Gate’s love child and use the whole drive
for my favourite distro.

So installed without really looking just let it do it all for me, DOH!

Now it has been running for just under a month and over the last 2-3 days
has slowed to a crawl on boot and runs like a donkey with 3 legs.

Did a little probing and a delving, did not see anything that hit me in the
face until I did a google on my phone because this lappy would not even
connect and Lo and behold it appears my / partition is full, err, no there
should be plenty of room, at least 6-7 Gigs by my quick mental estimate as I
know what I have installed.

Found a post on the forums about snapper and the back-ups had a look and yes
my / was full…

Bye Bye snapper may you rot in an evil place, I now have back 7 Gigs free
space on /,

But my little rant is that the default scheme could have been a bit more
intelligent in working out a partition set-up or even put a big warning
message about the pit falls of running snapper and btrfs on such a small /
partition,

This just goes to show that even us so called “experienced” users can get
bitten by being a bit of a smart ar*e and not reading the docs…

Now I wonder how many of the new users are going to come up against this
problem and not know what to do and finally give up and try another distro,

Luckily I do not have much in my nice 880 GIG"s * ( YES you read that right
880 mostly empty GIG"s ) /home on this single user lappy, so when I can get
to a more reliable WiFi spot that does not drop every 5 mins it will be
backup about 12 Gigs of stuff from home and then a fresh install without
btrfs, snapper and with LOADS more room on /.

I thank you for getting this far, personally it was TLDNR for me, and I
wrote it :slight_smile:

Cheers

  • Now at my age there is no way I would ever be around long enough to fill
    all that free space up, I may even dual boot to TW or something just for
    giggles.

You will now be returned to your normal service.


Mark
Nullus in verba
Caveat emptor
Nil illigitimi carborundum

On 2015-05-18 00:39, Baskitcaise wrote:

> OK I will admit that this is partly my fault not looking before I leap…

Yes, you should :slight_smile:

> But my little rant is that the default scheme could have been a bit more
> intelligent in working out a partition set-up or even put a big warning
> message about the pit falls of running snapper and btrfs on such a small /
> partition,

Yes, it should.

> Now I wonder how many of the new users are going to come up against this
> problem and not know what to do and finally give up and try another distro,

Several have hit this problem and reported here, yes. If they jump
distro, I’m sure they will be hit there by some other problem. There are
problems everywhere. IMO, you have to choose one distro, and try to
learn its quirks…

>
> Luckily I do not have much in my nice 880 GIG"s * ( YES you read that right
> 880 mostly empty GIG"s ) /home on this single user lappy, so when I can get
> to a more reliable WiFi spot that does not drop every 5 mins it will be
> backup about 12 Gigs of stuff from home and then a fresh install without
> btrfs, snapper and with LOADS more room on /.

If you have a large disk, you could simply reinstall (or expand) to a
much bigger root, and keep snapper, because it does have benefits.

Some novices have found out on their own that they could revert an
update that broke their system to the previous status, with just a few
key taps. Almost automatically. That’s a good thing.

> * Now at my age there is no way I would ever be around long enough to fill
> all that free space up, I may even dual boot to TW or something just for
> giggles.

1 TB? Wow, so small! You can fill that in no time :stuck_out_tongue:


Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.

(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” (Minas Tirith))

Carlos E. R. donned his tin foil hat and penned:

> Several have hit this problem and reported here, yes. If they jump
> distro, I’m sure they will be hit there by some other problem. There are
> problems everywhere. IMO, you have to choose one distro, and try to
> learn its quirks…

My main reason for posting this, is to show that even people who have used a
distro since the 90’s it is still recommended to do a bit of research before
just jumping in :slight_smile:

>
> If you have a large disk, you could simply reinstall (or expand) to a
> much bigger root, and keep snapper, because it does have benefits.
>
> Some novices have found out on their own that they could revert an
> update that broke their system to the previous status, with just a few
> key taps. Almost automatically. That’s a good thing.

Yep it is a good thing for the people who just want a system that works with
no problems I fully agree with you there, but what about us tinkerers who
like to have things go wrong and then learn by fixing them, I had a most
enjoyable afternoon/evening scratching my head not being able to get online
to find an east answer, reading loads of docs and stuff and then when you get
that “Eureka” moment and you realise that you have dropped the boot time
from over 8 mins to just under 2 mins

>
> 1 TB? Wow, so small! You can fill that in no time :stuck_out_tongue:
>
>

ah! but good stuff comes in small parcels is that not the Linux ethos?

:slight_smile:

Cheers Carlos have a nice day/evening, it is far past my beauty sleep time.


Mark
Nullus in verba
Caveat emptor
Nil illigitimi carborundum

One of my personal SOP (and I spread the word as much as I can),

It doesn’t matter if you’re installing a new OS or even a little app,

The first time (and often always), I <never> use the “install defaults automatically” option. Even if you never change a thing, the only way to know what is being done is to use the “Advanced” option however it’s presented. You can still accept each and every default setting as you click through, but at least you’ve seen every setting which would be made.

As for your Snapper issue…
I’d have to check, but isn’t the default to use all available free, unformatted space?
That would mean that if you created a 20GB partition, then that’s all you would have. If you wiped the entire disk and 1GB was free with no partitions, then by default the entire 1GB would be partitioned proportionately with the swap partition size based on the amount of physical RAM installed.

As for warning about Snapper requirements… It’s been discussed a few times in the regular Technical Help Forums.
Personally, I wonder if the solution would be to place snapshots in their own partition and remove/rotate the snapshots on a FIFO basis. But, maybe some snapshots would be of greater importance than others, so maybe certain snapshots should be marked not to be removed?

Anyway, those are things better minds than mine need to work out.
And, is probably reason why other distros are taking a slow approach before making BTRFS their default fs. Not faulting openSUSE since from what I’ve read, the snapshotting and self-repair features are absolutely needed moving forward because “everyone else” outside of Linux is already doing it (eg opensolaris, MS Windows).
AFAIK if for some reason BTRFS isn’t able to demonstrate a reliability, stability and performance that would warrant full adoption, the main alternative is the already solid (but perhaps not fully tested and integrated) XFS… Note that even with XFS to support snapshots you still need to create and reserve space, but maybe management is different.

Bottom line is… Make lots and lots of space available for snapshots whether you select BTRFS or XFS. And, it really is supposed to be a better “fs for the future” than ext4 now is.

TSU

On 2015-06-19 19:16, tsu2 wrote:
> As for your Snapper issue…
> I’d have to check, but isn’t the default to use all available free,
> unformatted space?
> That would mean that if you created a 20GB partition, then that’s all
> you would have. If you wiped the entire disk and 1GB was free with no
> partitions, then by default the entire 1GB would be partitioned
> proportionately with the swap partition size based on the amount of
> physical RAM installed.

AFAIK, the default yast does is 20 gigs for “/”, some for swap (I don’t
know how much), then the entire rest for “/home”.


Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” at Telcontar)