Re: [RFC] New attempt to a better "btrfs fi df"

On Oct 28, 2012, at 2:09 PM, Michael Kjörling [off-list ref] wrote:

I did not mean to imply that "sysadmins and storage experts aren't
also ordinary people" who can benefit from an "at a glance" view of
their storage situation. Quite to the contrary, that's one point I
have raised in this thread: the usefulness of an "at a glance" view of
the storage situation. But I can also certainly see the side of the
argument that they could reason their way around the concept of raw
storage capacity and allocation multipliers. After all, by the time
you get down to the "a few days of ordinary added data" range of free
space remaining, which would be when the exact numbers _really_ begin
to matter, you should be on top of adding more storage capacity
anyway.

Agreed. Whether the free space is GB, %, or time - in any case if it jumps from a "comfortable" value to a "crisis" value inside of a few days, it's a problem (for the user and the algorithm).

Somehow for large storage I like the idea of time to "full." GB and TB of storage is not really what we care about, it just seems that way because it's what we're used to. (Not to imply that we don't care about GB and TB at all, but I do think most people convert this into a "how many more movies, how much more database growth" and how much time remaining is just a generic variation on those things. GB/TB remaining doesn't do that, *and* just by nature of the term it connotes an absolute value with inflexible meaning. But free space on btrfs is flexible/relative, not absolute.

Chris Murphy