Copying a disk containing a btrfs filesystem

Copying a disk containing a btrfs filesystem

[Michael Schuerig]

SMART indicates that my notebook disk may soon be failing (an 
unreadable/uncorrectable sector), therefore I intend to exchange it. The 
disk contains a single btrfs filesystem with several nested(!) 
subvolumes, each with several read-only snapshots in a .snapshots 
subdirectory.

As far as I can tell, btrfs currently does not offer a sensible way to  
duplicate the entire contents of the old disk onto a new one. I can use 
cp, rsync, or send/receive to copy the "main" subvolumes. But unless I'm 
missing something obvious, the snapshots are effectively lost. btrfs 
send optionally takes multiple clone sources, but I've never seen an 
example of its usage.

If that's what "experimental" means, I'm willing to accept it. However, 
I'd like to emphasize that there's still something missing. Of course, 
most of all I'd like to be proved wrong.

Michael

-- 
Michael Schuerig
mailto:michael@schuerig.de
http://www.schuerig.de/michael/

Re: Copying a disk containing a btrfs filesystem

[Duncan]

Michael Schuerig posted on Thu, 10 Apr 2014 15:21:01 +0200 as excerpted:

> SMART indicates that my notebook disk may soon be failing (an
> unreadable/uncorrectable sector), therefore I intend to exchange it. The
> disk contains a single btrfs filesystem with several nested(!)
> subvolumes, each with several read-only snapshots in a .snapshots
> subdirectory.
> 
> As far as I can tell, btrfs currently does not offer a sensible way to
> duplicate the entire contents of the old disk onto a new one. I can use
> cp, rsync, or send/receive to copy the "main" subvolumes. But unless I'm
> missing something obvious, the snapshots are effectively lost. btrfs
> send optionally takes multiple clone sources, but I've never seen an
> example of its usage.
> 
> If that's what "experimental" means, I'm willing to accept it. However,
> I'd like to emphasize that there's still something missing. Of course,
> most of all I'd like to be proved wrong.

It's not a btrfs tool, but several of the tools you mentioned aren't, and 
you didn't mention dd (or ddrescue, if your source device starts giving 
you issues while you're cloning).  Using it you'd clone the entire raw 
device, including any not yet allocated areas, in a straight-across bit-
perfect copy.  Of course you'd need a target of either the same size or 
larger in ordered to do so...

That should give you a bit-perfect copy including the filesystem UUIDs, 
etc, which will confuse btrfs if you try to mount anything btrfs with 
both devices attached, so don't.  Do your clone, then umount and 
disconnect the old device before trying to mount the new one.


In fact, there are entire purpose-built special live-image distributions 
such as Clonezilla for managing storage devices like this.

http://clonezilla.org/

Or use a more general purpose "rescue" live-image distro such as 
SysRescue:

http://www.sysresccd.org/

Both of these tools support MS Windows systems as well.  Image-cloning is 
of course OS-agnostic -- what's on the cloned image doesn't matter, just 
whether the source device is readable and the destination writable.  And 
sysrescue is often used in the MS world to reset lost passwords and etc.  
I used to use it for that back when I still worked on friends' MS systems 
for "gratis" (well, traded for a good dinner or whatever), before I 
decided that wasn't a worthwhile use of my time, tho I'd be happy to 
teach them about Linux if they wanted, or might still do it if they paid 
me enough, but then there's other computer repair services that will do 
that if they're willing to pay.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

Re: Copying a disk containing a btrfs filesystem

[George Eleftheriou]

I would see one (dangerous? risky? needing more options perhaps?) solution:

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb

/dev/sda: old disk
/dev/sdb: new disk

Maybe there is another much more complicated solution:

Plug the old disk in a USB dock/case, do the same for the new disk in
another dock/case, plug both docks/cases in another linux system
running recent kernel and btrfs-progs and convert to a
"-dconvert=raid1 -mconvert=raid1" profile with a balance. Then degrade
it by removing the old disk and rebalance-convert back to single or
DUP profile (i am not quite sure this is even possible).

Just an idea. I wouldn't trust me.



On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 3:21 PM, Michael Schuerig
<michael.lists@schuerig.de> wrote:
>
> SMART indicates that my notebook disk may soon be failing (an
> unreadable/uncorrectable sector), therefore I intend to exchange it. The
> disk contains a single btrfs filesystem with several nested(!)
> subvolumes, each with several read-only snapshots in a .snapshots
> subdirectory.
>
> As far as I can tell, btrfs currently does not offer a sensible way to
> duplicate the entire contents of the old disk onto a new one. I can use
> cp, rsync, or send/receive to copy the "main" subvolumes. But unless I'm
> missing something obvious, the snapshots are effectively lost. btrfs
> send optionally takes multiple clone sources, but I've never seen an
> example of its usage.
>
> If that's what "experimental" means, I'm willing to accept it. However,
> I'd like to emphasize that there's still something missing. Of course,
> most of all I'd like to be proved wrong.
>
> Michael
>
> --
> Michael Schuerig
> mailto:michael@schuerig.de
> http://www.schuerig.de/michael/
> --
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-btrfs" in
> the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
> More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html

Re: Copying a disk containing a btrfs filesystem

[Michael Schuerig]

On Thursday 10 April 2014 13:58:45 Duncan wrote:
> Michael Schuerig posted on Thu, 10 Apr 2014 15:21:01 +0200 as 
excerpted:
> > SMART indicates that my notebook disk may soon be failing (an
> > unreadable/uncorrectable sector), therefore I intend to exchange it.
> > The disk contains a single btrfs filesystem with several nested(!)
> > subvolumes, each with several read-only snapshots in a .snapshots
> > subdirectory.
> > 
> > As far as I can tell, btrfs currently does not offer a sensible way
> > to duplicate the entire contents of the old disk onto a new one. I
> > can use cp, rsync, or send/receive to copy the "main" subvolumes.
> > But unless I'm missing something obvious, the snapshots are
> > effectively lost. btrfs send optionally takes multiple clone
> > sources, but I've never seen an example of its usage.
> > 
> > If that's what "experimental" means, I'm willing to accept it.
> > However, I'd like to emphasize that there's still something
> > missing. Of course, most of all I'd like to be proved wrong.
> 
> It's not a btrfs tool, but several of the tools you mentioned aren't,
> and you didn't mention dd (or ddrescue, if your source device starts
> giving you issues while you're cloning).  Using it you'd clone the
> entire raw device, including any not yet allocated areas, in a
> straight-across bit- perfect copy.  Of course you'd need a target of
> either the same size or larger in ordered to do so...
> 
> That should give you a bit-perfect copy including the filesystem
> UUIDs, etc, which will confuse btrfs if you try to mount anything
> btrfs with both devices attached, so don't.  Do your clone, then
> umount and disconnect the old device before trying to mount the new
> one.

Thanks for pointing out dd and especially ddrescue, which I didn't know. 
I regularly use dd to copy images onto USB thumb drives, but I'm a bit 
wary regarding its use on hard disks. I've always been concerned that if 
I get another disk, not necessarily of the same make, that has nominally 
the same capacity, it still might be a few blocks smaller. Well, I just 
found one that has the right size, apparently.

Thanks again,
Michael

-- 
Michael Schuerig
mailto:michael@schuerig.de
http://www.schuerig.de/michael/

Re: Copying a disk containing a btrfs filesystem

[Duncan]

George Eleftheriou posted on Thu, 10 Apr 2014 16:00:06 +0200 as excerpted:

> Maybe there is another much more complicated solution:
> 
> Plug the old disk in a USB dock/case, do the same for the new disk in
> another dock/case, plug both docks/cases in another linux system running
> recent kernel and btrfs-progs and convert to a "-dconvert=raid1
> -mconvert=raid1" profile with a balance. Then degrade it by removing the
> old disk and rebalance-convert back to single or DUP profile (i am not
> quite sure this is even possible).
> 
> Just an idea. I wouldn't trust me.

Creative idea, actually, and one I've seen come up here before tho if you 
read my earlier response I didn't mention it myself, as I failed to 
recall it.

But yes, it is somewhat more complicated, and sort of an abuse of 
existing features for a purpose they weren't intended for.  It should 
still work and such unintended purpose uses are a good thing, but because 
it is unintended usage, it won't have been tested much if at all, and 
given that btrfs isn't itself fully stable yet, there's a fair likelihood 
that some unanticipated complexities would arise while doing it, as well.

Meanwhile, by the very fact that btrfs is /not/ yet entirely stable, 
there's even more reason than normal to have good, tested backups.  Given 
that, there should be no harm in trying this, since even if it somehow 
kills the working copy, one can still restore from those already tested 
backups.  And someone's gotta be the first to test this method and report 
on how it went, right?

Meanwhile (2), given the existence of those tested backups, there's yet 
another way to accomplish things.  Simply restore from the backups the 
same way you would if the working copy went down and you had to restore 
it, only restore to the new device instead of the old one.  =:^)

(Actually, given my usual insistence on this key point, that btrfs isn't 
yet fully stable and that as a result by definition, you either have 
tested backups or you're demonstrating by practice that you simply don't 
care about losing the data anyway whatever your words might otherwise 
claim, I really should have thought of and mentioned the restoring from 
backups method first, instead of having it occur to me as an after-
thought.  I must be getting sloppy and careless in my thinking! =:^( )

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

Re: Copying a disk containing a btrfs filesystem

[Michael Schuerig]

On Thursday 10 April 2014 15:15:02 Duncan wrote:
> Meanwhile (2), given the existence of those tested backups, there's
> yet  another way to accomplish things.  Simply restore from the
> backups the same way you would if the working copy went down and you
> had to restore it, only restore to the new device instead of the old
> one.  =:^)

As the OP, let me insist that I have multiple backups. However and 
unfortunately, those backups do not contain the snapshots that I'd like 
to preserve when exchanging the disk. What makes the case complicate is 
not the question how to preserve and copy the current data; it's how to 
retain the historic data embodied in snapshots.

Michael

-- 
Michael Schuerig
mailto:michael@schuerig.de
http://www.schuerig.de/michael/

Re: Copying a disk containing a btrfs filesystem

[George Eleftheriou]

> What makes the case complicate is
> not the question how to preserve and copy the current data; it's how to
> retain the historic data embodied in snapshots.
>
You can always rsync (incrementally with --link-dest) to "another
place" the sequence of snapshots, provided of course there is enough
space in this "other place". However I understand this may not be the
coolest thing to do especially taking into account the SMART warnings
for imminent deterioration.

On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 5:15 PM, Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net> wrote:
> claim, I really should have thought of and mentioned the restoring from
> backups method first, instead of having it occur to me as an after-
> thought.  I must be getting sloppy and careless in my thinking! =:^( )

Maybe this is related to the fact that btrfs is maturing, gradually
causing you a sense of complete safety ;-)

Re: Copying a disk containing a btrfs filesystem

[Michael Schuerig]

On Thursday 10 April 2014 18:01:31 George Eleftheriou wrote:
> > What makes the case complicate is
> > not the question how to preserve and copy the current data; it's how
> > to retain the historic data embodied in snapshots.
> 
> You can always rsync (incrementally with --link-dest) to "another
> place" the sequence of snapshots, provided of course there is enough
> space in this "other place". However I understand this may not be the
> coolest thing to do especially taking into account the SMART warnings
> for imminent deterioration.

In the case at hand, I'll go with ddrescue. As far as backups are 
concerned, rsync --link-dest may be an option, however even at best it 
would only give file-granularity COW as opposed to block-granularity. 
I'm not sure if this would work for me in terms of disk space 
consumption.

I *think* send/receive with clone sources might be the key to a 
solution. I'm still hoping that someone with a far better understanding 
of btrfs than me gives it a try first...

Michael

-- 
Michael Schuerig
mailto:michael@schuerig.de
http://www.schuerig.de/michael/

Re: Copying a disk containing a btrfs filesystem

[Jan Kouba]

Dne Čt 10. dubna 2014 15:21:01, Michael Schuerig napsal(a):
> SMART indicates that my notebook disk may soon be failing (an
> unreadable/uncorrectable sector), therefore I intend to exchange it. The
> disk contains a single btrfs filesystem with several nested(!)
> subvolumes, each with several read-only snapshots in a .snapshots
> subdirectory.
> 
> As far as I can tell, btrfs currently does not offer a sensible way to
> duplicate the entire contents of the old disk onto a new one. 

Yes it does

You can make the old disk a seeding device and use it to seed the new one like 
this:


btrfstune -S 1 <old_device>

mount <old_device> /mnt
# this will be mounted read-only

btrfs dev add <new_device> /mnt

mount -o remount,rw /mnt

btrfs dev delete <old_device>

According to my experiments, the filesystem on the new device will have 
different UUID, so if you are mounting using UUIDs, you must change it 
everywhere, but other than that the new filesystem should have the same content 
as the old one (including subvolumes).


> I can use
> cp, rsync, or send/receive to copy the "main" subvolumes. But unless I'm
> missing something obvious, the snapshots are effectively lost. btrfs
> send optionally takes multiple clone sources, but I've never seen an
> example of its usage.
> 
> If that's what "experimental" means, I'm willing to accept it. However,
> I'd like to emphasize that there's still something missing. Of course,
> most of all I'd like to be proved wrong.
> 
> Michael

Re: Copying a disk containing a btrfs filesystem

[Martin Steigerwald]

Am Donnerstag, 10. April 2014, 17:51:26 schrieb Michael Schuerig:
> On Thursday 10 April 2014 15:15:02 Duncan wrote:
> > Meanwhile (2), given the existence of those tested backups, there's
> > yet  another way to accomplish things.  Simply restore from the
> > backups the same way you would if the working copy went down and you
> > had to restore it, only restore to the new device instead of the old
> > one.  =:^)
> 
> As the OP, let me insist that I have multiple backups. However and
> unfortunately, those backups do not contain the snapshots that I'd like
> to preserve when exchanging the disk. What makes the case complicate is
> not the question how to preserve and copy the current data; it's how to
> retain the historic data embodied in snapshots.

Well I think this is scriptable – although this would be some work.

Like this – pseudo shell code without verifying exact argument order:

- for each subvolume create according subvolume in destination
- for each snapshot – from oldest to newest:
  - rsync / btrfs send snapshot
  - snapshot with same name
  - rsync next newer snapshot


I have snapshots on backup drive… so I´d probably ditch snapshots on 
production side… but if you want them… thats another idea.


Although I like the balance idea as well. I used it to RAID-1 my /home to dual 
SSD setup. But I didn´t to the degrading step.

Ciao,
-- 
Martin 'Helios' Steigerwald - http://www.Lichtvoll.de
GPG: 03B0 0D6C 0040 0710 4AFA  B82F 991B EAAC A599 84C7

Re: Copying a disk containing a btrfs filesystem

[Michael Schuerig]

On Thursday 10 April 2014 19:17:13 Jan Kouba wrote:
> Dne Čt 10. dubna 2014 15:21:01, Michael Schuerig napsal(a):
> > SMART indicates that my notebook disk may soon be failing (an
> > unreadable/uncorrectable sector), therefore I intend to exchange it.
> > The disk contains a single btrfs filesystem with several nested(!)
> > subvolumes, each with several read-only snapshots in a .snapshots
> > subdirectory.
> > 
> > As far as I can tell, btrfs currently does not offer a sensible way
> > to duplicate the entire contents of the old disk onto a new one.
> Yes it does
> 
> You can make the old disk a seeding device and use it to seed the new
> one like this:

Intriguing. I didn't find much on the topic, but these pages seem 
pertinent

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs#Seed_devices
https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Seed-device
http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/97819/64935

> btrfstune -S 1 <old_device>

Does the "1" mean "true" or is this indeed an integer-value arg? I've 
only seen the "1" in examples, are there other possible values?

> mount <old_device> /mnt
> # this will be mounted read-only
> 
> btrfs dev add <new_device> /mnt
> 
> mount -o remount,rw /mnt
> 
> btrfs dev delete <old_device>

Is the last one the step where data is copied from the seed device to 
the second device? No balance required before deleting the device?

Thanks!

Michael

-- 
Michael Schuerig
mailto:michael@schuerig.de
http://www.schuerig.de/michael/

Re: Copying a disk containing a btrfs filesystem

[Jan Kouba]

Dne Čt 10. dubna 2014 20:36:32, Michael Schuerig napsal(a):
> On Thursday 10 April 2014 19:17:13 Jan Kouba wrote:
> > Dne Čt 10. dubna 2014 15:21:01, Michael Schuerig napsal(a):
> > > SMART indicates that my notebook disk may soon be failing (an
> > > unreadable/uncorrectable sector), therefore I intend to exchange it.
> > > The disk contains a single btrfs filesystem with several nested(!)
> > > subvolumes, each with several read-only snapshots in a .snapshots
> > > subdirectory.
> > > 
> > > As far as I can tell, btrfs currently does not offer a sensible way
> > > to duplicate the entire contents of the old disk onto a new one.
> > 
> > Yes it does
> > 
> > You can make the old disk a seeding device and use it to seed the new
> 
> > one like this:
> Intriguing. I didn't find much on the topic, but these pages seem
> pertinent
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs#Seed_devices
> https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Seed-device
> http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/97819/64935
> 
> > btrfstune -S 1 <old_device>
> 
> Does the "1" mean "true" or is this indeed an integer-value arg? I've
> only seen the "1" in examples, are there other possible values?
Yes, "1" means "true", "0" false. If you run it twice with the same argument, 
it says something like "Seeding flag already set/unset.".
> 
> > mount <old_device> /mnt
> > # this will be mounted read-only
> > 
> > btrfs dev add <new_device> /mnt
> > 
> > mount -o remount,rw /mnt
> > 
> > btrfs dev delete <old_device>
> 
> Is the last one the step where data is copied from the seed device to
> the second device? No balance required before deleting the device?
Yes, everything is copied, no balance needed.


Well actually if you don't need to preserve the filesystem on the old device, 
you can just add the new device into the filesystem and remove the old one like 
this:

mount <old_device> /mnt
btrfs dev add <new_device> /mnt
btrfs dev delete <old_device> /mnt

The last command will copy everything from <old_device> to the <new_device> 
and somehow wipe the <old_device> so it can't be mounted anymore.
 
This method will also preserve the UUID of the filesystem so there is no need 
to change any config files.


Jan Kouba

Re: Copying a disk containing a btrfs filesystem

[Duncan]

Michael Schuerig posted on Thu, 10 Apr 2014 18:24:00 +0200 as excerpted:

> I *think* send/receive with clone sources might be the key to a
> solution. I'm still hoping that someone with a far better understanding
> of btrfs than me gives it a try first...

Well, there's both that (which I don't know enough about to discuss in 
any intelligent way at all), and the fact that at least until very (very) 
recently (like recent enough I'm not sure it'll all be in 2.15 yet), 
btrfs send/receive still had some serious corner-case bugs, such that to 
my knowledge if it worked without error it was reliable, there were 
numbers of cases (like where it was originally subdir /a/b/, and then 
switched to /b/a, reversing the nesting) where it would spit out errors, 
leaving the receive in a half-received state.

So it worked for some people but not others, and for some it would work 
for awhile, then would start erroring out, whenever they hit whatever 
corner-case.

Regulars on this list will have seen all the recent work going into send/
receive bug tracing and fixing, however, which will of course ultimately 
make it far more reliable than it had been.  Surely it's already far more 
reliable, as a fair number of those corner cases have now been found and 
dealt with.

But what I do NOT know yet, is where in the process we are, in terms of 
/reliable/ send/receive.  Relatively, we're certainly closer than we 
were, but did that move use from say 80% to 90% reliable, or from 80% to 
97 or 98% reliable (which is about where I'd put general btrfs at this 
point), or from 90% to 98-ish% reliable, or... ?  

Without that knowledge, even if you did know the specific CL options you 
needed, I'd still consider it very much a "great if it works, but don't 
count on it until you actually see it complete without errors, and even 
then, be aware that the next time you try it could error out, because 
it's still very much in bug-fixing-phase" solution.

Meanwhile, the ddrescue solution is mature technology, proven to work 
with many different types of filesystems over many years, now, so that's 
the basket I'd be putting my resource eggs into at this point. =:^)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

Re: Copying a disk containing a btrfs filesystem

[Brendan Hide]

Hi, Michael

Btrfs send/receive can transfer incremental snapshots as well - you're 
looking for the "-p" or "parent" parameter. On the other hand, it might 
not be the right tool for the job.

If you're 100% happy with your old disk's *content*/layout/etc (just not 
happy with the disk's reliability), try an overnight/over-weekend 
ddrescue instead:
http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Ddrescue

What I've done in the past is scripted ddrescue to recover as much data 
as possible. Its like using dd between two disks except that it can keep 
a log of bad sectors that can be retried later. The log also helps by 
ensuring that if you cancel the operation, you can start it again and it 
will continue where it left off.

Additionally, you can have it skip big sections of the disk when it 
comes across bad sectors - and it can "trim" these sections on 
subsequent runs.

Btrfs send/receive has the advantage that you can run it while your 
system is still active. DDrescue has the advantage that it is very good 
at recovering 99% of your data where a disk has lots of bad sectors.

For btrfs, send/receive the main subvolumes then, afterward, 
send/receive the snapshots using the "parent" parameter, "-p". There 
*is* the possibility that this needs to be reversed - as in, the backup 
should be treated as the parent instead of the other way around:

  btrfs send /home | btrfs receive /mnt/new-disk/home
  btrfs send -p /home /backups/home-2014-04-08 | btrfs receive 
/mnt/new-disk/backups/.

____

Below is from the last scriptlet I made when I last did the ddrescue 
route (in that case I was recovering a failing NTFS drive). It was 
particularly bad and took a whole weekend to recover. The new disk 
worked flawlessly however. :)

How I've used ddrescue in the past is to connect the failing and new 
disk to a server. Alternatively, using USB, you could boot from a rescue 
CD/flash drive and do the rescue there.

a) Identify the disks in /dev/disk/by-<whatever-you-choose> and put 
those values into the bash script below. ensure that it refers to the 
disk as a whole (not a partition for example). This ensures that 
re-ordering of the drives after a reboot won't affect the process.
b) Set up a log file location on a separate filesystem - a flash drive 
is ideal unless you've gone the "server" route, where I normally just 
put the log into a path on the the server as so: 
/root/brendan-laptop.recovery.log

#!/bin/bash
src_disk=/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3250410AS_6RYF5NP7
dst_disk=/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3500418AS_9VM2ZZQS
#log=/path/to/log
log=~/brendan-laptop.recovery.log

#Sector size (default is 512 - newer disks should probably be 4096)
sector_size=4096

#Force writing to a block device - disable if you're backing up to an 
image file
#force=""
force="-f"

# We want to skip bigger chunks to get as much data as possible before 
the source disk really dies
# For the same reason, we also want to start with (attempting) to 
maintain a high read rate
#Minimum read rate in MB/s before skipping
min_readrate=10485760


#Default skip size is 64k.
for skip_size in 65536 16384; do
  #Going forward
  ddrescue -r 1 -a $min_readrate -b $sector_size -d $force -K $skip_size 
$src_disk $dst_disk $log
  #Going in reverse
  ddrescue -r 1 -a $min_readrate -b $sector_size -d $force -K $skip_size 
-R $src_disk $dst_disk $log
done

#Default skip size is 64k.
#This time re-trying all failed/skipped sections
for skip_size in 4096; do
  #Going forward
  ddrescue -r 1 -a $min_readrate -b $sector_size -d $force -K $skip_size 
-A $src_disk $dst_disk $log
  #Going in reverse
  ddrescue -r 1 -a $min_readrate -b $sector_size -d $force -K $skip_size 
-R -A $src_disk $dst_disk $log
done

#Default skip size is 64k.
for skip_size in 1024 256 64 ; do
  #Going forward
  ddrescue -r 1 -b $sector_size -d $force -K $skip_size $src_disk 
$dst_disk $log
  #Going in reverse
  ddrescue -r 1 -b $sector_size -d $force -K $skip_size -R $src_disk 
$dst_disk $log
done

echo "Done. Run an chkdsk/fsck/whatever-might-be appropriate for the new 
disk's filesystem(s)"


On 10/04/14 15:21, Michael Schuerig wrote:
> SMART indicates that my notebook disk may soon be failing (an
> unreadable/uncorrectable sector), therefore I intend to exchange it. The
> disk contains a single btrfs filesystem with several nested(!)
> subvolumes, each with several read-only snapshots in a .snapshots
> subdirectory.
>
> As far as I can tell, btrfs currently does not offer a sensible way to
> duplicate the entire contents of the old disk onto a new one. I can use
> cp, rsync, or send/receive to copy the "main" subvolumes. But unless I'm
> missing something obvious, the snapshots are effectively lost. btrfs
> send optionally takes multiple clone sources, but I've never seen an
> example of its usage.
>
> If that's what "experimental" means, I'm willing to accept it. However,
> I'd like to emphasize that there's still something missing. Of course,
> most of all I'd like to be proved wrong.
>
> Michael
>


-- 
__________
Brendan Hide
http://swiftspirit.co.za/
http://www.webafrica.co.za/?AFF1E97

Re: Copying a disk containing a btrfs filesystem

[Michael Schuerig]

On Friday 11 April 2014 12:39:31 Brendan Hide wrote:
> If you're 100% happy with your old disk's *content*/layout/etc (just
> not  happy with the disk's reliability), try an
> overnight/over-weekend ddrescue instead

Thanks again to everyone who replied and especially for suggesting 
ddrescue. In the meantime, I've got a suitable new disk and copied the 
data to it using ddrescue (it took about 12 hours for 1TB). The disk had 
one fault extending over a few successive sectors.

For some reason, I had to repair the first partition, which I use for 
swap. The large second with btrfs on it seems fine. I ran btrfs scrub on 
it and it found one error:

Apr 16 09:48:27 fuchsia kernel: [ 6792.829186] btrfs: checksum error at 
logical 74443923456 on dev /dev/sdb2, sector 145398288, root 1228, inode 
59102093, offset 929792, length 4096, links 1 (path: 
usr/lib/debug/.build-id/8f/b82df57b7b6fff7033f6abd7de914b82f98160.debug)

That file is part of a "historical" snapshot which I have deleted by now 
and thus presumably dealt with the problem.

Michael

-- 
Michael Schuerig
mailto:michael@schuerig.de
http://www.schuerig.de/michael/