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?

  • CyborganismOPEnglish
    1·
    2 hours 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.