btrbk VS BorgBackup

That's still easier using snapshots and something like btrbk. Snapshot the directory at start, prune if there are too many snapshots (or snapshots get too old).

I'm on Arch, but you might still find it useful: Btrfs snapshots Arch Wiki - Incremental backup to external drive GitHub - btrbk

the smoothest backup tool i have seen for Linux is btrbk works real nice and is customizable for almost all use-cases BTRFS rocks :)

I recommend redundancy and regular verification is you want to insure your data against corruption. If you do that, you can forget about things like ECC. My setup is a NUC server running Ubuntu with a USB3-connected storage drive running BTRFS. I use btrbk to auto-snapshot and auto-replicate via incremental sends to my BTRFS backup drive, and RotKraken to track integrity of the data with a monthly verification run so that I notice corruption in time to correct it.

In pondering my backup strategy, I was wondering if I could use BTRFS snapshots and a backup tool like btrbk, which is a nice integrated snapshot/backup solution I've used happily on desktop Linux. BTRFS needs subvolumes for snapshots, so I couldn't backup the host itself (which wasn't installed with a / subvolume like other distributions I've used), but it could snapshot the VMs and containers, which have their own individual subvolumes. Then btrbk can send that snapshot in an incremental fashion to external storage.

I then installed btrbk and tried to follow the instructions to create snapshots of root and home on the SSD and then send/receive those to the HDD. I mainly used https://github.com/digint/btrbk and https://mutschler.dev/linux/fedora-btrfs-35/, but I don't use luks.

For anyone using btrfs on their system, I heartily recommend btrbk, which has served me very well for making incremental backups with a customizable retention period: https://github.com/digint/btrbk

btrbk is the best solution I know.

I use BTRBK to make and copy the BTRFS snapshots to my HDD. I schedule it to run every 3 hours using a Sytemd unit file through my own script to avoid running the backup at inconvenient moments:

i use - and recommend - "borgbackup": for example with the "vorta" graphical frontend

* https://www.borgbackup.org/

* https://vorta.borgbase.com/install/windows/

just my 0.02€

I used this many, many years ago but switched to Borg[0] about five years ago. Duplicity required full backups with incremental deltas, which meant my backups ended up using too much disk space. Borg lets you prune older backups at will, because of chunk tracking and deduplication there is no such thing as an incremental backup.

[0] https://www.borgbackup.org/

Currently, I'm auto-backing it up with borg (push mode) through wireguard tunnel to NAS behind ISP's CGNAT. The borg takes care of deduplication in SQL file, so incremental update (even in append-only mode) is very small for PostgreSQL dump.

Borg 2 has been in development for nearly a year and a half [1] and may probably be released early next year, i.e., early 2024 (just a guess, seeing that even RC1 is not yet released and seems to have a lot of work to be done).

Does anyone know how Borg 1.x and 2 would compare to Kopia?

[1]: https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/issues/6602

You could use borgbackup.