What’s the best and easiest way to stop the -cow files?
I don’t want there to be the private-cow.img or even the .old files… How can I get rid of this without deleting them all the time after I shut down my guests?
First of all, I would strongly suggest not using the old “file” storage pool, it has several limitations, is quite slow and storage inefficient. Either use LVM (the default) or file-reflink (on xfs or btrfs), or even ZFS.
But to answer your question - currently there is no option for that, but at one point there will be, once Add an option to use private volume directly, not via a snapshot · Issue #8767 · QubesOS/qubes-issues · GitHub gets implemented.
I don’t use LVM because that is too unstable and just bad for use, too many restrictions and issues. LVM is just way too slow and is also all over the place on the drive.
Good to know something will be implemented in the near future to fix the issue that is built in to utilise the snapshots. One checkbox to just not use that code that is there is a good thing.
BTRFS and XFZ and ZFS…
I don’t want a COW system on my drive, so BTRFS is out. (High RAM usage too)
I don’t use journaling as it is slow and inefficient, so XFS is out on that alone, yet would also be unreasonable due to dynamic allocations and delayed allocations.
I don’t use filesystem raid, I use hardware raid, so ZFS is pointless. (Uses too much RAM as well)
So those filesystems are a little pointless. (In my situation)
but I wouldn’t touch LVM with an 11 ft pole.
The one time Qubes installed itself with LVM for the machines, data was all over the place and couldn’t be handled or sorted easily. partitions were crap.
Having files allows for all data to be stored in a row for the guests, instead of all over the drive.
Just having files on the drive is way more efficient for reading and writing to.
If I had M.2 NVME drives, wouldn’t be any issue at all with the files for speed.
I have no issues with the speeds, I max out my BUS with the amount of things I have running. If I used ZFS I wouldn’t have enough RAM to be able to run more than one guest at a time.
#8767 is just add a checkbox to not execute some code, that’s about 10 minutes work…
I would be happy to hear about what limitations there are on using the file based system that is better for backups, recovery, Qubes Upgrades, and more.