Using btrfs snapshots for incremental backup

You have heard of Apple Time Capsule, and zfs's snapshots which provide nice way to produce incremental backups which you can use to quickly recover a rm -Rf typo or compare changes... You can't really use LVM snapshots for that because they have fixed size of snapshot. ZFS has copy-on-write snapshots, but zfs-fuse isn't fastest solution on Linux.

I decided to give btrfs another try. On Debian 2.6.32-trunk kernels, it stills have problems with 686 kernel, but amd64 version (even with 32-bit users-pace) seems to work stable so far.

Let's take a look at example usage on /dev/vg/koha-btrfs logical volume.

create filesystem

root@mlin:~# mkfs.btrfs /dev/vg/koha-btrfs

create subvolume which we will use for data

root@mlin:~# btrfsctl -S koha-2010-01-25 /virtual.btrfs/

populate it with some data

root@mlin:~# time cp -ra /virtual.clone/koha-2010-01-25 /virtual.btrfs/

real    15m32.507s
user    0m1.288s
sys     0m54.519s

create base snapshot
```
root@mlin:~# btrfsctl -s /virtual.btrfs/koha-2010-01-25.mlin /virtual.btrfs/koha-2010-01-25
```
There is convention here: since snapshot directories have to be on same btrfs volume, I decided to use base_name(dot)something as convention for my snapshots.

make some changes on base directory

root@mlin:~# time rsync -ravH --numeric-ids --sparse --delete --exclude 'backup*' 10.60.0.90:/opl/clone/koha-2010-01-25/ /virtual.btrfs/koha-2010-01-25/

sent 1538957 bytes  received 381670534 bytes  964049.03 bytes/sec
total size is 18912566086  speedup is 49.35

real    6m37.539s
user    0m59.524s
sys     1m23.633s

make another snapshot for this version

root@mlin:~# btrfsctl -s /virtual.btrfs/koha-2010-01-25.opr /virtual.btrfs/koha-2010-01-25

Following this, we now have three directories which share same data (tanks to copy-on-write feature in btrfs) and look like ordinary directories:

dpavlin@mlin:~$ ls -ald /virtual.btrfs/koha-2010-01-25*
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 256 Dec 29 19:38 /virtual.btrfs/koha-2010-01-25
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 256 Dec 29 19:38 /virtual.btrfs/koha-2010-01-25.mlin
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 256 Dec 29 19:38 /virtual.btrfs/koha-2010-01-25.opr

After a while, you will run out of disk space, but since we are on LVM, extending filesystem is really easy:

dpavlin@mlin:~$ mount -t btrfs
/dev/mapper/vg-koha--btrfs on /virtual.btrfs type btrfs (rw,noatime)


root@mlin:~# lvdisplay /dev/vg/koha-btrfs 
  --- Logical volume ---
  LV Name                /dev/vg/koha-btrfs
  VG Name                vg
  LV UUID                kl4QUc-IyK2-IM8m-0DKD-eI5k-H2T1-HySIwE
  LV Write Access        read/write
  LV Status              available
  # open                 1
  LV Size                40.00 GB
  Current LE             10240
  Segments               1
  Allocation             inherit
  Read ahead sectors     auto
  - currently set to     256
  Block device           253:1

   
root@mlin:~# lvextend -L +10G /dev/vg/koha-btrfs
  Extending logical volume koha-btrfs to 50.00 GB
  Logical volume koha-btrfs successfully resized


root@mlin:~# btrfsctl -r max /virtual.btrfs/

Hopefully this will help you to get started with btrfs snapshots. I still don't consider it super stable (especially since i did saw few kernel oopses using 2.6.32-trunk-686) but for quick experiments with Linux containers (or anything stored on filesystem for that matter) it proved more than adequate.