Fedora 33 File System

Your user has full access to /home/myuser, and when your user decides to start a script that encrypts /home/user you better have a backup. However, if you stick to software packages from the official Fedora repository, it is much more unlikely to catch that malicious script than if download random .exe files from shady websites or opening .docx with macros from an email that then run in MS Word on Win.

So, yes and no.

Hello, I installed fedora 29 as my first version and made two updates 29>30 30>31. I am still on fedora 31. As my system is quite a learning by doing system it is time to make a nice new installation.

My knowledge is also a bit older but i would like to know more about installing fedora 33 with btrfs.
I do have a terabyte ssd drive and have two partitions on it. 100GB as “/” mounted and the rest for “/home” . For booting i do still use legacy mode.

Now my first question is if i should also change from legacy boot mode to efi ?
I use a just Linux system and use virtualization (Virtualbox and new libvirt) to use other os’es.

I also see that i still use msdos partition table … second question I guess this i can also change?

While writing my questions i was reading
UEFI - Wikipedia
But now i have a doubt about the partition table … it says Booting UEFI systems from GPT-partitioned disks is commonly called UEFI-GPT booting . Despite the fact that the UEFI specification requires MBR partition tables to be fully supported what makes me believe that i would need 3 partitions too boot with UFI ?! and the UFI needs an MBR as partition table?

I hope someone sees my dilemma and can give me some advice how to partition (how many partitions; size and file system.) to install fedora 33 successfully.

First off.
UEFI booting can be done on MBR (legacy) partitioned drives, but it requires some finess to do so.
If you are considering a switch from legacy partitioning and booting which requires booting from the MBR to UEFI booting which does not boot from the MBR. UEFI normally uses GPT partitioning and (I believe) has about 2048K of space immediately after the MBR which it uses for the boot record. UEFI does NOT require MBR booting, quite the opposite, and that wikipedia article is sadly out of date.

There are a lot of posts on this forum about both switching from legacy to GPT partitioning and for installing F33 with BTRFS and without BTRFS. I suggest you search a lot within this forum for answers to your questions then when armed with more information come back with more informed questions.

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I suggest backing up your home directory of important files, don’t forget to save Firefox bookmarks to a file before the backup if you aren’t using Firefox Sync. If all you care about are files you can just copy folders using Files (Nautilus). For something more complete but still simple, Pika Backup is good. You can do a local backup to a drive or USB stick, or remote to the cloud.

Once the backup is done you can reinstall using Automatic partitioning and when it asks you to reclaim space (because the whole drive is used by the current Fedora installation) just delete everything and start from scratch. That will use Btrfs by default and it will create one big Btrfs file system that’s shared for system and home.

Before reinstalling you want to decide about the firmware. If it’s a laptop you probably want UEFI. If it’s a desktop it probably doesn’t matter. But which ever one you pick, the installer will create the proper partitions if you use Automatic partitioning.

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Thx for your answer.

Yes i will. And maybe create own posts with less questions :wink:

About the off topic part, i guess on the first post it is difficult when not able to create own topics.

As you use VM already, it will be best to do a trial run inside VM before changing your baremetal.

  1. I see no urgent need to switch from BIOS boot to UEFI boot, unless you want to test UEFI only bootloader. Fedora is defaulting to use grub2, which will keep support BIOS boot.

  2. Are you using File System Encryption? You need more testing if you do.

  3. Provided you have enough free space in your /home, you can do a P2V of your “/” partition. It serves as backup and a fall back option.

  4. 100G is enough to test btrfs in Fedora. So KEEP “/home” with all backups done. Then switch to UEFI boot, and create all the required /boot, /boot/efi and the btrfs filesystem, with the default “/” and “/home” subvolumes. (I will not auto mount “/home” until everything is working fine)

Avoid using expermental Raid5 and/or Raid6 feautres of btrfs, and your data is safe with btrfs.

Once your OS is in btrfs, then you can switch/migrate your “/home” to btrfs using various methods.

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Thanks for your detailed infos.

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As you have everything backed up to external drive already, then I will do complete reinstallation using UEFI boot of Fedora 33.

One major benefit of UEFI boot is, fwupdmgr only works in UEFI mode.

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This article might helping to make the right decision:

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