btrbk VS kopia

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 think Kopia would be great for your use case

https://kopia.io/

It has a great system to snapshot files but only store data if it's changed. I use it in an environment where I can't use something like zfs to snapshot data because I don't have the ability to make decisions about what filesystem we're using. It's been amazing, love it so much!

Thanks for the tip on Kopia. Setting it up now, looks perfect.

https://github.com/kopia/kopia

Kopia - GitHub

I've been happy with: https://kopia.io/

Fairly easy to configure, does snapshots to S3 and has a icon in my tray I can watch :)

Btw, kopia is one fine backup tool. Apparently borgbackup is good too.

Kopia is great, though it's worth noting for folks on Linux: non-UTF-8 paths aren't stored correctly [1] and xattrs aren't stored [2]. While most folks probably won't care about the former, the latter can could cause issues (eg. losing SELinux labels makes it difficult to restore a backup of the root filesystem on distros that use SELinux).

[1] https://github.com/kopia/kopia/issues/1764

[2] https://github.com/kopia/kopia/issues/544

I think Kopia [1] is on its way to be that. I am sticking to Restic for now but it seems like the strongest contender.

[1]: https://github.com/kopia/kopia

I used their trial for a bit to test it out with Vorta [1] in a container. Vorta (and Borg) seemed to work fine, until I wanted to restore an archive and I noticed that my recent snapshots were completely empty. Probably because of a misconfiguration on my end though. But it made me look elsewhere. For me backups should be a fire, test and forget solution.

Recently I made the switch to Kopia [2] which seems to have feature parity with Borg (and Restic [3]). It also has a web UI which is way easier to work with than Vorta. And I can easily view, extract and restore individual files or folders from there. This gave me way more confidence about this solution. The only thing I really miss is that I cannot chose different targets for different paths. For instance, with Borg I was able to backup a partial of my Docker appdata to an external source. And I haven't found a way to do this with Kopia. Besides that I'm pretty happy with this solution and I would recommend it.

1. https://vorta.borgbase.com/

2. https://kopia.io/

3. https://restic.net/

There's a few. Off the top of my head

https://github.com/kopia/kopia