Btrfs supports btrfs send and receive tools to backup subvolumes which is built in and good.
However considering the current storage data utilization in the industry, using send/receive would be very slow operation and kills lot of CUP cycles of source machine. As an example, file systems such as ext3/ext4/xfs/ntfs file systems provides bitmap information so that backup applications can quickly backup used blocks and regenerate file system during recover. Various techniques adopted around these layouts and protecting data of these file systems are very fast. Off course these file systems doesn't manage any thing under FS layer. volume mangers such as LVM2, VXVM etc.. manages disks underneath but provides good snapshot capabilities to snapshot entire file system. When it come to btrfs, only subvolume can be snap-shotted where as entire btrfs cannot. Also there is no way to backup subvolume as single entity and reuse it as individual btrfs file system with one subvolume. In current btrfs send/receive solutions, btrfs receive does userlevel replay may not do image recovery to provide recovered btrfs with the subvolume backup. Hope I made my point clear and would love to see btrfs providing native features which helps backup applications do faster backups. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-btrfs" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
