btrbk VS snap-sync

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:

- https://github.com/qubidt/snap-sync

You might be interested in snap-sync. It is a bash script which accomplishes btrfs backups using snapper under the hood. So no need to use btrbk (but you get all the same functionality).

I've been using snapper and snap-sync for automated snapshots and backups to an external drive. Recently, snap-sync is no longer maintained, and it may not be able to do some more things that I want to do, such as:

I was actively using snap-sync to back up my files to a local hard drive. Unfortunately, snap-sync will be retired soon.

I use snapper for snapshots and snap-sync for backing up said snapshots on an external drive.

Yeah, I use snapshots for backups using snap-sync, which is a convenience script around btrfs send. Personally I use it to back up onto an external HDD, but it can also do remote backups over SSH. I'm just not sure if remote backups are incremental or not.

On my laptop I make extensive use of openSUSE's snapper and the snap-sync script to sync to two external USB drives. Lastly, I wrote a script to clean/expire snapshots on the external volumes.

Snapshots aren't proper backups by themselves; they don't protect you from disk failure or the entire filesystem somehow being corrupted. It is possible to use them as backups; personally I use a command-line script called snap-sync to do this. This has the advantage of retaining the incremental nature of snapshots (though the incrementality will be on your backup media, so the first snapshot of a 100GB filesystem you put on your backup drive will take up 100GB of space), plus it integrates nicely with Snapper which is the snapshot utility I use.