This Linux storage feature feels like cheating once you understand it

“Copy-on-write (CoW) changes that bargain in a way that almost feels like cheating. Instead of rushing to overwrite old blocks, a CoW file system writes the changed data somewhere else and then updates its map. That simple shift is what makes snapshots, cheap clones, rollbacks, and smarter backups possible.” I like the advice in the article about creating a test partition or drive to test this out first. I made the mistake in the early days of putting my entire 1 TB plus /home partition only BTRFS and I had quite a few teething problems and I did not fully understand how it all worked. I can’t recall what issue I had at the time, but I did always do daily backups to my EXT4 based second hard drive. But in the end I went back to EXT4. It may have been a performance issue back then, and that the snapshots were saved in what I thought was an odd location. It has matured a lot more and good to see the support is now baked into the kernel. But no matter how good you think your file system…