From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from mail-ea0-f193.google.com ([209.85.215.193]:56222 "EHLO mail-ea0-f193.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752542AbaBSNqF (ORCPT ); Wed, 19 Feb 2014 08:46:05 -0500 Received: by mail-ea0-f193.google.com with SMTP id f15so187852eak.0 for ; Wed, 19 Feb 2014 05:46:02 -0800 (PST) Received: from linuxpc.localnet (194-118-189-56.adsl.highway.telekom.at. [194.118.189.56]) by mx.google.com with ESMTPSA id x2sm928321eeo.8.2014.02.19.05.46.01 for (version=TLSv1.1 cipher=ECDHE-RSA-RC4-SHA bits=128/128); Wed, 19 Feb 2014 05:46:01 -0800 (PST) From: GEO <1g2e3o4@gmail.com> To: linux-btrfs@vger.kernel.org Subject: Incremental backup over writable snapshot Date: Wed, 19 Feb 2014 14:45:57 +0100 Message-ID: <17860756.QfG9CfNMqv@linuxpc> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Sender: linux-btrfs-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: Hi, As suggested in another thread, I would like to know the reliability of the following backup scheme: Suppose I have a subvolume of my homedirectory called @home. Now I am interested in making incremental backups of data in home I am interested in, but not everything, so I create a normal snapshot of @home called @home-w and delete the files/folders I am not interested in backing up. After that I create a readonly snapshot of @home-w called @home-r, that I sent to my target volume with btrfs send. After that is done, I do regular backups, by always going over the writeable snapshot where I remove always the same directories I am not interested and send the difference to the target volume with btrfs send -p @home-r @home-r-1| btrfs receive /path/of/target/volume. I do not like the idea of making subvolumes of all directories I am not interested in backing up. So what I would like to know now is the following: Could there be drawbacks of doing this resp. could I further optimize my backup strategy, as I experienced it takes a while for deleting large files in the writeable snapshot (What does it write there?) Could my method somehow lead to inefficiency in terms of the disk space used at the target volume (I mean, could the deleting cause a change, so that more is actually transferred as change, than in reality is?)? One last question would be: Is there a quick way I could verify the local read only snapshot used last time is the same as the one synced to the target volume last time? Thank you for your support and the great work!