Luckily, you can remove any snapshot from the Btrfs filesystem.

If you back up your Btrfs snapshots frequently, you will end up with a lot of snapshots, and it may become difficult to manage them. Btrfs will calculate the difference and send only the required data to the destination Btrfs filesystem (the external drive).įor example, to take an incremental backup of the /data/.snapshots/web1- snapshot, you must specify the parent snapshot (the latest snapshot available on both the source and destination Btrfs filesystems), /data/.snapshots/web1-, as well.Īn incremental backup of the /data/.snapshots/web1- snapshot can be taken to an external Btrfs filesystem, as follows: When you take a new snapshot on the source Btrfs filesystem, the new snapshot is compared with the latest snapshot (available on both the source and the destination Btrfs filesystem) of the source Btrfs filesystem. The common snapshot is usually the latest snapshot of a Btrfs subvolume. To take an incremental backup, you will need a common snapshot of both the source and the destination (external drive) Btrfs filesystems. Now, we are ready to take an incremental backup. To create a Btrfs filesystem on the sdb1 partition and give it the filesystem label data, run the following command:

I will use the sdb2 partition for backing up the snapshots of the Btrfs filesystem created on the sdb1 partition. I will use the sdb1 partition for storing the data and Btrfs snapshots. I will format both the sdb1 and sdb2 partitions as Btrfs. You may use a USB thumb drive or an external hard drive, as well just be sure to format it with the Btrfs filesystem.įor assistance with installing the Btrfs filesystem in Ubuntu, check out my article Install and Use Btrfs on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.įor assistance with installing the Btrfs filesystem in Fedora, check out my article Install and Use Btrfs on Fedora 33. The Btrfs filesystem created on the sdb2 partition will act as the external drive. The snapshots created on the Btrfs filesystem ( sdb1) will be backed up to the Btrfs filesystem created on the sdb2 partition. I will create Btrfs filesystems on the sdb1 and the sdb2 partitions. So, be sure to replace these names with yours from now on. Note: Your hard disk or SSD will have a different name than mine, and so will the partitions.

Snapshot hdd