Comment on Backups made easy: btrfs + snapper + snapborg

HelloRoot@lemy.lol ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

• MorphiusFaydal@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  It’s most useful for something like /home so you have a full backup of your home directories without having to worry if some app has dumped its settings on a folder you don’t have marked for backup. But also backing up / is useful because it gives you an easy recovery in the event of say disk failure. Just restore the entire system from a backup.

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  • HelloRoot@lemy.lol ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    I use borg with borgmatic. I just back up / and exclude some folders I don’t want. It does the same as you just said.

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    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      You can have btrfs subvolumes that contain only the stuff you care about. In the article, they have a subvolume for untracked files, and this doesn’t get backed up.

      I have one for /home and /srv (my self-hosted stuff), and those are the ones I care about backing up. For everything else, I keep manual copies in either /home or /srv (e.g. edits to system configs and container configs are in a git repo). So I could back up those two subvolumes and get 99% of what I care about, and hope I’ve done a good job documenting the other 1%, which are reproducible w/ a bit of time searching how to configure stuff.

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      • HelloRoot@lemy.lol ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        This keeps backups efficient since you can ask the filesystem to only send the changes instead of going over all the files and figuring out what has changed, so it’s probably a lot faster.

        Aaaah!

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• Lem453@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  With snapshots it costs nothing if the OS files don’t change much

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  • HelloRoot@lemy.lol ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    You misunderstood my question, because what you said is true either way with borg.

    The question is, what is the advantage of backing up the whole subvolume “block device” vs just / file structure.

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    • totikom@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Backing up via snapborg allows you to see file structure, because actually it is a file-based backup. snapper here allows me to separate snapshot creation from actual backups.

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    • Lem453@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Oh i see.

      that is a good point. Being about the mount the borg repo and pull out a specific file is very useful. Not sure I would do it as a bloc device since I don’t think there is an easy way to see specific files.

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    • InverseParallax@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Metadata.

      You get the exact structure, you get the correct dates/times/permissions.

      Theres a vast difference between even what rsync -p gives you VS what a snap gets you, especially the versioned files.

      It’s the difference between a git repo and a zip file.

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• totikom@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Snapshots are made atomically, so this workflow allows you to separate snapshot creation from actual backing up.

  As subvolumes are dynamically sized, you can create as many subvols as you like and backup those, that need it.

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