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?

  • CyborganismOP
    1·
    2 days 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.