grub-btrfs VS snap-sync

Afaik the proper solution is to use https://github.com/Antynea/grub-btrfs/blob/master/initramfs/readme.md and/or rollback the root to a snapshot.

In fact I’m pretty knowledgeable around btrfs and snapshot-tools as well. :D I codevelop https://github.com/Antynea/grub-btrfs.

Something I noticed is that the instructions here before step 2 suggest that the files /etc/initcpio/install/grub-btrfs-overlayfs and /etc/initcpio/hooks/grub-btrfs-overlayfs might exist, and they don't for me. Worth noting that I installed through pacman, which may be a reason they don't exist if I'm reading those instructions correctly.

In Debian, I see that there is a custom installer "Spiral Linux" (https://spirallinux.github.io) with non-default settings that achieves the same kind of mechanism using "grub-btrfs" (https://github.com/Antynea/grub-btrfs) in combination with "snapper-rollback" (https://github.com/jrabinow/snapper-rollback) and a BTRFS subvolume layout suggested by the Arch wiki (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Snapper#Suggested_filesystem_layout).

grub-btrfs

When the issue first arrived (around 01/11/2023, IIRC), I did try posting an "Issue" on the GitHub page for grub-btrfs (located here), & more specifically on Issue #254, however, for whatever reason (at that time) I wasn't able to make a post on that Issue/forum.

- 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 Recently, snap-sync is no longer maintained, and it may not be able to do some more things that I want to do, such as: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.