Hello,

I have a desktop PC which I’ll be running Kubuntu 24.04 LTS as my main OS. No Windows dualboot or anything.

I have 2 hard drives.

  • My main one is a 1TB SSD NVME disk which will contain my Linux OS on a single BTRFS partition.
  • My second one is a 1TB HDD NTFS formatted disk which contains only my data files (Pictures, Documents, Downloads, Desktop, Music, Videos, etc. Symlinked in my /home/user directory to replace the folders of the same name)

Since I’ll be using BTRFS, I’ll be performing snapshots (daily, weekly, monthly) with a certain retention for each.

But I want to also take snapshots of my whole system on a monthly basis or so on an external 8TB external backup drive (one of those big ones as big as a book that’s permanently hooked up to my PC) for safety’s sake.

My external USB backup HDD is exFAT formatted (out of the box).

Doing an rsync from from my NTFS data drive to my external drive won’t be a problem. But I can’t do an rsync from my BTRFS SDD to my external drive because of permissions, ownership, etc.

What do you suggest I do in that case for my SDD drive?

I was thinking of creating a mountable ext4 disk image of maybe 2-4TB and mounting it at boot, then doing an rsync to that disk image on a monthly basis.

What do you think?

EDIT:

I’ve since installed Kubuntu on my PC and I decided to go with BTRFS + snapshots of my filesystem on a daily, weekly and monthly basis with retention rules using TimeShift. BTRFS is a powerful filesystem that has volumes and snapshots built in. And it’s SUPER easy to use, either throug command line or TimeShift app. (If you’re using a non-Ubuntu based distro, make sure you configure your volumes properly. I use this to create snapshots of my root filesystem. I have a separate disk for my data.

I also found out about KDE Plasma’s backup tools in the control center. There’s an option to create synchronized backups. You select a folder to back up and set a schedule (daily, weekly, etc) to back up your files on a regular basis. Be careful though. Because it’s synchronized, if you delete a file in the original location, it will be deleted in the backup destination. I’ve setup mine to back up my data disk to an external HDD once a week. This gives me some time to recover if I mess up. You can also browse the backed up files as you would any directory.

This is the perfect solution for me. My files are not SUPER important, but having the option of being able to recover from a problem or a mistake is really nice. I feel much more at peace this way. I highly recommend this solution to anyone, especially if you’re using a more unstable, bleeding edge distribution. It’s super easy to set up and to recover.

  • @kaotic
    1•2 months ago

    Check out Kopia. It can create snapshots at almost any interval. I take one every 15 minutes. It deduplicates data, so it doesn’t take up a lot of space. You can also go back and retrieve a version of your file from any snapshot.

    • CyborganismOPEnglish
      1•2 months ago

      Thanks, but I think I’ll use BTRFS built-in snapshot feature for that kind of backup. You can set it up easily with Timeshift.

  • lurch (he/him)
    1•2 months ago

    I suggest tar, because it can store permissions. Also, you should export the partition layout (maybe with sfdisk idk), the boot sector using dd and the EFI system partition using something like partimage. You can tar it after you exported the other things, so the tar will include them neatly

    • CyborganismOPEnglish
      1•2 months ago

      I just found out about the backup tool in KDE. It’s called Kup I think. One part uses Bup and the other uses RSync.

      For my SSD Linux partition, I ended up using TimeShift to schedule BTRFS snapshots on the daily, weekly and monthly with retention rules. I can always roll back to a previous snapshot if something goes wrong. And I don’t really care if the disk fails, I have no important data on that disk other than my OS and programs.

      All my data is on a separate HDD, which I decided to back up using the KDE Backup in the System Settings app. I use the Synchronized Backup option which I think is RSYNC in the background. It’s scheduled for once a week and asks me before running it. It’s great because you can browse your backup with any file manager and if I delete a file in the source location, it also deletes it in the backup destination location. So if I accidentally delete a file, I can quickly restore it, unless I tell the backup to execute, which will delete it.

  • Dr JekellEnglish
    1•2 months ago

    I use Timeshift to backup my SSD to a HDD then I use Lucky backup to (oneway) sync my main folders (doc, music, download, pic, videos, etc) to a USB HDD.

    Still need to figure out how to do an encrypted backup to cloud storage (thanks to 90% of common cloud storage is based in the USA with very loose data protection laws).

    • CyborganismOP
      1•2 months ago

      So I opted for BTRFS snapshots of my main filesystem using Timeshift and using KDE’s backup tool in the system settings to do a synchronized backup of my data (documents, photos, music, etc) to an external HDD that’s always plugged in

      This is the perfect solution for me. I don’t want to go into something too complicated and this does the job.

      However, Timeshift is made almost explicitly for Ubuntu. It expects the BTRFS volumes to be configured the same way. So if you install any other distribution that doesn’t follow their standard it won’t work. I found that out trying it with Debian in a VM.