Client btrfs / large fs

general discussion
1

Hi Everyone-

How does the client file tracking work? More importantly, how well does it scale? I’m looking to backup up a file system with 3TB of small files. Rsync takes a damn long time…

Also, does urbackup take advantage of or plan to use btrfs snapshots and incremental send on the client side? Specifically, it should be possible to take a snapshot for each full backup and keep it around. Then, for an incremental backup, take another snapshot then use “btrfs -i <full_backup_snapshot> <new_snapshot>” to get just the changed data, ship it to the server and use “btrfs receive” to restore it to the server’s new snapshot for the incremental. This avoids the urbackup client from either monitoring the entire FS or scanning through all the files on each and every backup.

Thoughts?

~John

2

If you are on Linux it does not track the files at all. On Windows it collects the folders in which files have changed and only looks at those folders during incremental backups. The complete file list still has to be created and transferred but it is usually fast even with a lot of files.

Using btrfs send/receive is currently not planned. I know there is also a command to get a list of files which have changed between snapshots. But UrBackup would still need the functionality to keep track of the snapshots.