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this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2026
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That... Is literally how you do it. You install the system onto a subvolume. Or many, in fact - the way I do. Root, var, srv, home, opt all get their own subvolume. Only boot stays as a separate partition.
Ignoring
/boot, what is the benefit of putting everything else in different subvolumes? As opposed to just one subvolume for/and one for/home, which is what I currently have. It just looks to me like it’d be extra work, but I’m probably missing somethingYou snapshot them separately, with snapshots stopping where another subvolume starts. Have a problem booting? Copy the latest /-snapshot. But if for example /var/log is a separate subvolume it persists and you can look up what was wrong.
My setup right now has subvolumes
root(mounted to/),home(mounted to/home) ,logs(mounted to/var/log),snapshots(mounted to/.snapshots),pacman-cache(mounted to/var/cache/pacman) andswap(for the swapfile obviously).I do snapshots of
root,homeandlogs(landing insnapshots) regularly that don't require much space (only the difference between on subvolume and its snapshot uses real space in btrfs) and which can all be restored together as well as separately, while losing the temporary data incacheandswapis not problem.And you can also transfer the snapshots somewhere else as backup (into another brtfs filesystem or as a file), including just transfering the difference from the last one as an incremental backup.
You can snapshot them independently. E.g. I snapshot
/on every update and boot,/homeevery boot, and temporary file directories such as/tmp&/var/tmpdon't get snapshot at all and are also mounted withnodev,nosuid,noexecflags.