[Gluster-users] Rebalancing with no new bricks.

[Jeff Darcy]

On 06/12/2013 09:46 AM, Stephan von Krawczynski wrote:
> The true question is indeed: why does he need "tricks" at all to come to
> something obvious for humans: a way of distributing files over the glusterfs
> so that "full" means really all bricks are full.

That's my view too.  I keep trying.

> 3) The data must be left accessible even if glusterfs is not used on the
> bricks any longer - without copying "back".

This part is already true in practically all cases.  You can ignore the 
.glusterfs directory and extra xattrs, or nuke them, and you have a perfectly 
normal file/directory structure that's usable as-is.  The exceptions are if you 
use striping or erasure coding, but (like RAID) those are fundamentally ways of 
slicing and dicing data across storage units so some reassembly would be necessary.