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title: "Incremental backups with btrfs" date: 2011-09-07T08:54:00Z tags: ["programming"]
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btrfs is teh win. No, seriously. It's not the only file system that can do this, but it's the first one I've had installed, and it's beautiful, man.
I got myself a little 2TB external USB 3.0 hard drive ($99! Past Sean, be very jealous) and wrote a backup script; my first version had all of this complex Towers of Hanoi rotation scheme, but then I realized I didn't need any of it if I used btrfs's snapshots. Now, my backup script consists mainly of:
sg_start --start /dev/sdh # Tell the drive to spin up mount /dev/sdh1 /mnt/backups btrfsctl -s /mnt/backups/backup-$todays_date \ /mnt/backups/backup-$yesterdays_date rsync -va --numeric-ids --delete-before --ignore-errors \ --partial --inplace $backup_paths \ /mnt/backups/backup-$todays_date sync umount /mnt/backups sg_start --stop /dev/sdh
It does a little more than that (error checking, logging, etc), but not *much* more. After the first backup, the disk usage was 15GB; ten days later, I have ten incremental backups, and it's *still* 15GB.
Of course, the problem with this is that snapshots are, essentially, COW hard links; this means that if there's a corruption on the disk for a file, it'll affect all child snapshots. My mitigation is to add another backup disk: they're only $99 (cripes, I can't get over that price), and each backup is taking about 8 minutes to run (most of that time is spent in rsync, detecting changes) -- I can easily affordable to run two backups a night. It's not as safe as a rotation backup, but it's safe enough.