Subvolumes and snapshots

bcachefs supports subvolumes and snapshots with a similar userspace interface as btrfs. A new subvolume may be created empty, or it may be created as a snapshot of another subvolume. Snapshots are writeable and may be snapshotted again, creating a tree of snapshots.

Snapshots are very cheap to create: they’re not based on cloning of COW btrees as with btrfs, but instead are based on versioning of individual keys in the btrees. Many thousands or millions of snapshots can be created, with the only limitation being disk space.

The following subcommands exist for managing subvolumes and snapshots:

• bcachefs subvolume create: Create a new, empty subvolume

• bcachefs subvolume destroy: Delete an existing subvolume or snapshot

• bcachefs subvolume snapshot: Create a snapshot of an existing subvolume

A subvolume can also be deleting with a normal rmdir after deleting all the contents, as with rm -rf. Still to be implemented: read-only snapshots, recursive snapshot creation, and a method for recursively listing subvolumes.