btrbk VS UrBackup

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:

UrBackup https://www.urbackup.org/ is the one that I use for years

If anyone came here looking for good quality, open source and free backup software I recommend UrBackup and Kopia.

Free, open source, maintained regularly: www.urbackup.org

I'm looking at https://www.urbackup.org/

You could have a look at UrBackup. Its a client/server backup solution. Also you could rsync the local backup server too the remote lokation.

I would also recommend UrBackup. In my experience it's extremely reliable. https://github.com/uroni/urbackup_backend

Veeam gets most of the hype these days, but if you don't need a Mac client, UrBackup is a solid option. Full & incremental file and image backups for one machine or your whole network, scheduling, rolling copies, etc.

Kopia does not 'image' your whole machine.

A real shame imaging is the time saving component if a system is not recoverable. People want to get their systems up and running as fast as possible.

A combination of imaging and file back up is the best way to do that. For now I'll stick with http://www.urbackup.org/