There was an article back in the days of btrfs introduction that described the 
process: https://fedoramagazine.org/convert-your-filesystem-to-btrfs/

I've used it myself without any issues back then, I would assume it's still 
safe to do so now.

I ran it like this for a few more releases without issues, until I decided to 
re-install fresh.

The only downside would probably be (please keep me honest here), the defaults 
might not apply.

There are few things that are done on a fresh install, which will _probably_ 
won't apply on a converted system:

- COW (copy-on-write) disabled for /var/lib/libvirt/images
  - probably on other directories?
  - can be done manually with `chattr -R +C <path>` but it only works for new 
files in said path, so you might need to move things out and back in
- enable compression by making sure fstab includes `,compress=zstd:1`
- based on your position on async discard [0], you might want to add 
`nodiscard` to fstab as well, but it seems to be okay with latest fixes kernels 
6.2.13+ or 6.3.0, at least on a desktop

[0] 
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/btrfs-discard-storm-on-fedora/79997/28

---
Best regards, Alex


------- Original Message -------
On Tuesday, May 2nd, 2023 at 11:29, Paul Smith <phh...@gmail.com> wrote:


> Dear All,
> 
> I have always upgraded Fedora from the previously installed version.
> Consequently, I still have ext4. To have btrfs, is it needed to do a
> Fedora clean install?
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> 
> Paul
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