On Sun, 28 Oct 2018 at 11:03, Russell Coker via luv-main <luv-main@luv.asn.au> wrote:
If you use a filesystem other than ZFS or Ext4 you can use a loopback mount, just create a regular file of a suitable size, run mkfs.ext4, then mount -o loop.
If you use BTRFS then you can have a loopback ext4 filesystem snapshotted as part of the subvol that contains it.
Hello, mostly I lurk here to learn from everyone else, but in the interest of technical correctness, may I chip in with the minor nitpick that loop devices are not and never have been "loopback" devices, but somehow it seems that word often gets used out of context . The word "loopback" does not appear in mount(8) or losetup(8). See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loop_device which says: "Sometimes, the loop device is erroneously referred to as loopback device, but this term is reserved for a networking device in operating systems. The concept of the loop device is distinct." And no, I did not write that ... :p I vaguely remember that there have been some instances of this misuse in kernel code comments, so it might appear there, and there may have been some effort to correct that too. But it's not something I've followed closely.