apologies if this is a resend - it appeared to me that it was rejected because of something in how Gmail was formatting the message. I can't find it in the Gmane archives which leads me to believe it was never delivered. I was hoping to gain some clarification on btrfs snapshops and how they function as backups. I did a bit of Googling and found lots of examples of bash commands, but no one seemed to explain what was going on to a level that would satisfy me for my data needs. I read this Ars Technica article today http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/bitrot-and-atomic-cows-inside-next-gen-filesystems/ First of all, the btrfs-raid1 sounds awesome. Because it helps protect against one of RAID1's failings - bit rot issues. But raid1 is not backup, it's just redundancy. Second, the article mentions using snapshots as a backup method. Page 3 section: Using the features. He makes a snapshot and sends that. Then he sends what changed the second time. He mentions that because btrfs knows what's changed it's a quick process. Right now on my Linux computer I use Back in Time which, I think, is just an rsync frontend. It takes a long time to complete the backup for my 1 TB /home drive. The copy part is nice and quick, but the comparison part takes a long time and hammers the CPU. I have it setup to run at night because if it runs while I'm using the computer, things can crawl. So I was wondering if btrfs snapshots are a substitute for this. Right now if I realize I deleted a file 5 days ago, I can go into Back in Time (the gui) or just navigate to it on the backup drive and restore that one file. >From what I've read about btrfs, I'd have to restore the entire home drive, right? Which means I'd lose all the changes from the past five days. If that's the case, it wouldn't really solve my problem - although maybe I'm just not thinking creatively. Also, if I first do the big snapshot backup and then the increments, how do I delete the older snapshots? In other words, the way I'm picturing things working is that I have the main snapshot and every snapshot after that is just a description of what's changed since then. So wouldn't the entire chain be necessary to reconstruct where I'm at now? On a somewhat separate note, I have noticed that many people/utilities for btrfs mention making snapshots every hour. Are the snapshots generally that small that such a think wouldn't quickly fill a hard drive? Thanks for reading my questions, I appreciate the help. When all is said and done I'd certainly like to publish a how-to from my point of undertanding. -- Eric Mesa -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-btrfs" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html