So, since staying with Debian Stable is nice but not very shiny I've just set up, from scratch, Debian Jessie with a btrfs-root. (BTW, Andy, the net-install of jessie doesn't work, or at least didn't work as of yesterday. It failed to set up the network.) Anyway, my goal was to have some of the nice new stuff in Jessie and being able to do btrfs snapshots and send/receive for incremental backups (rsync is nice, but block-level incremental backup is nicer.) I first installed Debian Wheezy, with /dev/xdva1 as a 250MB /boot partition with ext3 and /dev/xvda2 as btrfs for / - fortunately the Wheezy installer supports btrfs[1] so I didn't really have to do anything special apart from using two partitions instead of one. After this I did a dist-upgrade from a minimal Wheezy to Jessie. This was absolutely painless (thanks for the XZ-kernel pygrub-stuff Andy!) and I was left with a Jessie-based system with /boot on ext3 and / as btrfs. I then proceeded to overengineer everything and created btrfs subvolumes for $HOME as well as for /etc - what can I say, I _like_ being able to snapshot things! (I did this manually, but I suppose I could have done this at install-time as well. Doing "mv /etc /etc_old" felt _weird_!) An unexpected, but in hindsigt obvious, sideffect of making subvolumes of /etc and $HOME was that snapshots of / (and hence btrfs send /.rootsnap) doesn't include /etc and $HOME. I suppose I'll have to overengineer my new backup-regime as well - it'll be a nice exercise :-) Anyway, it works and I really like being able snapshot /etc before installing updates or fiddling with configuration. I'm sure snapshots of $HOME will also prove convenient. - OM [1] Newer kernels & btrfs-tools are nicer, and at some point btrfs in Wheezy didn't support btrfs send/receive which is one of the things I really want.