btrbk VS refind-btrfs

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:

Then you need a service that will check snapshots folder and automatically create boot entries. I have refind-btrfs, which does exactly that.

rEFInd can also be used to boot into Btrfs snapshots using this automation tool.

Yes, see refind-btrfs

It's a actually third party tool which simply automates the whole process because enabling such a feature manually is pretty cumbersome and annoying.

In a similar vein, there's also https://github.com/Venom1991/refind-btrfs.

Especially when using refind-btrfs. "This tool is used to automate a few tedious tasks required to boot into Btrfs snapshots from rEFInd. It is to rEFInd what grub-btrfs is to GRUB.". It works great.

Well.. The same way GRUB has grub-btrfs, rEFInd has refind-btrfs, which automates the whole process of booting your snapshots. Maybe you could give rEFInd a try. And honestly, I don't think that the GRUB issue will happen again. I'm using Linux for ages and it's the first time I saw it messing stuff up. Sorry if not answers your questions directly.

Like GRUB has grub-btrfs to automate this process, refind has refind-btrfs. I never tested grub-btrfs, but refind-btrfs is awesome.

I'm using snapper with refind-btrfs. The setup was confusing at first but now it works nicely.