Re: Need help with incremental backup strategy (snapshots, defragmentingt & performance)

[Roman Mamedov <rm@romanrm.net>]

On Wed, 1 Nov 2017 01:00:08 -0400
Dave <davestechshop@gmail.com> wrote:

> To reconcile those conflicting goals, the only idea I have come up
> with so far is to use btrfs send-receive to perform incremental
> backups as described here:
> https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Incremental_Backup .

Another option is to just use the regular rsync to a designated destination
subvolume on the backup host, AND snapshot that subvolume on that host from
time to time (or on backup completions, if you can synchronize that).

rsync --inplace will keep space usage low as it will not reupload entire files
in case of changes/additions to them.

Yes rsync has to traverse both directory trees to find changes, but that's
pretty fast (couple of minutes at most, for a typical root filesystem),
especially if you use SSD or SSD caching.

-- 
With respect,
Roman