Marc's Blog: btrfs - Historical Snapshots of Backups With Btrfs

π 2014-05-20 01:01 in Btrfs, Linux

How to manage historical snapshots of backups with Btrfs

I have a setup where I backup a certain number of machines to a central server. There are multiple ways to do hierarchical backups with btrfs.

not great because of COW relationship lost to unix tools,

not great because backing up server on another one requires a lot more snapshots of snapshots for btrfs send of old things that never change

works for deduping data that partially changes or changes owners

newer btrfs should be ok with many hardlinks

du can figure out the data saved

you can use hardlinks.py instead of bedup

can be transferred via cp/rsync without losing links

but hardlinks will not work across subvolumes

very nice, does not require hardlinks which you can't do across subvolumes

works for deduping data that partially changes or changes owners

but totally lost as soon as you copy it anywhere else (unless you use btrfs send)