snap-sync VS buttersink

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 Recently, snap-sync is no longer maintained, and it may not be able to do some more things that I want to do, such as: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

for data I rely on my filesystem. Both ZFS and BRTFS support atomic snapshots which need no additional storage space (i.e. copy-on-write), and you can sync those to wherever you need using rsync or whatever. As long as you sync the snapshot you are guaranteed to have a consistent state. You can however also efficiently sync the snapshots themselves to other volumes of the same type. There is e.g. buttersink (https://github.com/AmesCornish/buttersink) which allows you to incrementally sync snapshots over the network, as long as both source and target are a btrfs volume. For restore copy the most recent snapshot back to the new drive and off you go.

For backup I use Buttersink (https://github.com/AmesCornish/buttersink seems abandoned, but still works well on Python2) to sync my snapshots to a separate disk every once in a while.

I've thought about saving snapshots to S3, but I like the idea of being able to randomly access any single file from S3, so some sort of sync (e.g. s3cmd sync) is more attractive.