On need for manual balancing

Features
1

I have Rockstor booting off a fairly small (16 GB) SSD boot drive, which I’ve found will fill up if I don’t manually run a balance operation every couple or few weeks.

I could simply create a cronjob to take care of this, but can’t we do better?

2

Sure we can! What would you like to do?

3

TBH, I’m not 100% sure. One option would be to allow scheduled tasks for balancing.

4

Just bumping this.

The other issue is I thought more recent BTRFS releases do auto-rebalancing, but @suman mentioned some problem with upgrading earlier installs.

5

I ended up setting up a cron job to balance weekly. FWIW, this is what I see two days after a balance. This is not an intensively used system; should I be rebalancing daily?

# btrfs fi usage /
Overall:
    Device size:		  12.93GiB
    Device allocated:		   7.53GiB
    Device unallocated:		   5.40GiB
    Device missing:		     0.00B
    Used:			   6.18GiB
    Free (estimated):		   6.42GiB	(min: 6.42GiB)
    Data ratio:			      1.00
    Metadata ratio:		      1.00
    Global reserve:		  80.00MiB	(used: 0.00B)