Migrate from hardlinks to btrfs snapshots

Testing with docker image i started with out the SYS_ADMIN permission so it ran a few backups with out BTRFS snapshots. when i figured this out and fixed the docker the backups failed with error could not make snapshot(not exact error) since this was a new secondary backups server i was able to just nuke the backups and start over on that one…

how ever i have another instance running on a sonology that is also on btrfs but using hardlinks 50tb using 17T of physical disk space. if there is not a way after the second server gets a safe amount of backup data i can just nuke the org one… but i would rather do a in place update to keep the older data in case it’s needed. [because of custom attributes on the sonology btrfs i was never able to rsync/btrfs send the data to another system]

if not something to warn or detect on a running server if it started with hard links and changed to btrfs.

You can already switch back and forth freely between backups to btrfs with snapshots and not. You might have to run a full backup as you noticed.

Thank you for the reply… so just to be clear i will need to FORCE a FULL FILEBACKUP after changing enabling BTRFS [might suggest adding this to the FAQ]