Do you know Btrfs, the trendy file system on Linux? Well, guess what? You can now access it directly from Windows thanks to an open-source software called WinBtrfs!
It’s a driver for Windows that allows you to mount Btrfs partitions in both read and write modes. This means you can explore your Btrfs disks, copy files to them, delete files, basically do everything you would do with a regular Windows partition.
And the cool thing is, it supports a bunch of advanced Btrfs features, such as:
- Subvolumes and snapshots
- Compression (zlib, LZO, zstd)
- RAID (RAID0, RAID1, RAID10, RAID5, RAID6)
- Deduplication
- Encryption
- And many other awesome features that I’m too lazy to list
The folks who coded this did everything from scratch, not a single line of code from the Linux kernel, so it’s clean, it works great, it’s stable. A true passion project!
And it’s super easy to install! You grab the latest release from the project’s GitHub, install it, and bam, it works right away! Of course, you still need to be careful, we’re talking about messing with partitions, so always have backups just in case. But generally, if you know what you’re doing, there’s no reason for it to fail.
This way, no more hassle with crappy network shares, just mount the disk and boom, you have access to all your files as if they were local. And with compression and deduplication, you save a ton of space!
In any case, if you want to try it out and you have some Btrfs partitions lying around, I highly encourage you to install WinBtrfs and play with it. It’s really a handy tool!
