It is only for new data.
For example, you would have to defragment your filesystem again with btrfs filesystem defragment -r -v -czstd /
. Where zstd
is an algorithm and /
, a root path. With this command, the default compression level will be used, which is level 3.
Be careful, defragmenting the btrfs file system will/can duplicate the data.
As for a mount point, if you decided to use zstd algorithm with level 1 compression, just add the compress=zstd:1
or compress-force=zstd:1
to the mount options (fstab or while mounting manually)
If I know correctly, defrag will always duplicate the reflink files.
https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Defragmentation.html