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.
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.
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.
?? Maybe you don’t have enough data for it to matter, but when you have tons of files, manually looking through the filesystem can take a while, whereas the FS can keep track of what’s actually changed.
You can have
btrfssubvolumes 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.
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!
?? Maybe you don’t have enough data for it to matter, but when you have tons of files, manually looking through the filesystem can take a while, whereas the FS can keep track of what’s actually changed.