Re: Are there plans for full btrfs filesystem backups?

[Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net>]

Marc MERLIN posted on Sun, 10 May 2015 09:49:44 -0700 as excerpted:

> Are there any plans for a full filesystem send/receive, not just a
> subvolume send/receive?

Recent discussion suggests yes, tho it's a relatively new plan.

More specifically, the recent discussion seemed to settle around the need 
for a send/receive --recursive option, which would recurse into nested 
subvolumes.  IIRC, the systemd folks requested that for their container 
management, among other things.  And if I remember the thread correctly, 
I /believe/ one of the devs said they agreed and were taking on the 
project.

That would of course allow recursing from ID5/the-root-subvolume, thus 
filling your request, but it would be more flexible than full filesystem 
send/receive, as it could handle arbitrary subvolume subtrees, too.

Previous to that, I don't believe it was on the roadmap.  It reads like a 
bunch of people, now including you, independently becoming aware that it 
was a problem at roughly the same time.


Meanwhile, there's another potential alternative as well, for the whole 
filesystem non-incremental case.  If you're backing up everything, you 
can of course dd/netcat the individual component devices making literal 
byte for byte copies, tho you'd want to do it to a remote machine, to 
avoid the kernel detecting a local copy as part of the same filesystem, 
due to UUID duplication.  But incrementals, parallel to send/receive with 
parent, would seem to be impractical.

-- 
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"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
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