Re: btrfs based backup?

[joshua@mailmag.net]

I highly recommend something similar to snapper or btrbk (https://github.com/digint/btrbk) for the automation of snapshotting.

I've used snapper previously and currently use btrbk, and both allow you to set very customizable retention policies for snapshots.

Say you take snapshots every hour, you could configure something like:
- Keep Hourly snapshots for 24 hours.
- Keep Daily snapshots for 7 days.
- Keep Weekly snapshots for 4 weeks.
- Keep Monthly snapshots for 6 months.

Of course you can optimize what snapshots you keep based on your knowledge of the data, and balancing point-in-time recovery vs not having too many snapshots to make some btrfs operations slower.

btrbk is focused towards running it both on a source and a destination server to automate send & receive for backup purposes, but it can also simply manage snapshots on the local machine.


November 12, 2019 10:34 AM, "Ulli Horlacher" <framstag@rus.uni-stuttgart.de> wrote:

> I need a new backup system for some servers. Destination is a RAID, not
> tapes.
> 
> So far I have used a self written shell script. 25 years old, over 1000
> lines of (HORRIBLE) code, no longer maintenable :-}
> 
> All backup software I know is either too primitive (e.g. no versioning) or
> very complex and needs a long time to master it.
> 
> My new idea is:
> 
> Set up a backup server with btrfs storage (with compress mount option),
> the clients do their backup with rsync over nfs.
> 
> For versioning I make btrfs snapshots.
> 
> To have a secondary backup I will use btrfs send / receive,
> 
> Any comments on this? Or better suggestions?
> 
> The backup software must be open source!
> 
> -- 
> Ullrich Horlacher Server und Virtualisierung
> Rechenzentrum TIK 
> Universitaet Stuttgart E-Mail: horlacher@tik.uni-stuttgart.de
> Allmandring 30a Tel: ++49-711-68565868
> 70569 Stuttgart (Germany) WWW: http://www.tik.uni-stuttgart.de
> REF:<20191112183425.GA1257@tik.uni-stuttgart.de>