masc3d / btrfs-sxbackup

Incremental btrfs snapshot backups with push/pull support via SSH

btrfs-sxbackup

Btrfs snapshot backup utility

• Push/pull support via SSH
• Retention
• Email notifications
• Compression of transferred data
• Syslog logging

System dependencies

Required

The following packages have to be available on both source and destination

• bash
• btrfs-progs

The system executing btrfs-backup requires

• python3

Optional

• ssh (for remote push/pull, not required for local operation)
  • bash has to be set as the default remote shell for the user running the backup
• lzop (for compression support if desired)
• pv (provides progress indication if installed)
• sendmail (for email notifications if desired)

Installation

Setup

• when using ssh, public/private key authentication should be set up

Known limitations

• the destination filesystem has to be mounted without the subvol option, otherwise an error will occur on btrfs receive prompting you to remount with fs tree
• some commands (like update) may not be available for backup jobs created with older versions of btrfs-sxbackup. in this case backup jobs can be recreated using destroy and init. existing snapshots will be kept as long as destroy is not invoked with --purge.

Usage examples

Initialize

Initialize a backup job pulling snapshots of subvolume / on remote host myhost.org to local subvolume /backup/myhost

Initialize a backup job pushing snapshots of local subvolume / to remote subvolume /backup/myhost on host mybackupserver.org

note that in the ssh:// URL, the username and port part are optional; if not specified, the defaults will be used.

Run

Run a backup job

Cron

Cronjob performing a pull backup job

Synopsis and options

init

run

update

info

purge

destroy

transfer