GEO posted on Thu, 27 Feb 2014 14:10:25 +0100 as excerpted: > Does anyone have a technical info regarding the reliability of the > incremental backup process using the said method? Stepping back from your specific method for a moment... You're using btrfs send/receive, which I wouldn't exactly call entirely reliable ATM -- just look at all patches going by on the list to fix it up ATM. In theory it should /get/ there, but it's very much in flux at this moment; certainly nothing I'd personally rely on here. Btrfs itself is still only semi-stable, and that's one of the more advanced and currently least likely to work without errors features. (Tho raid5/6 mode is worse, since from all I've read send/receive should at least fail up-front if it's going to fail, while raid5/6 will currently look like it's working... until you actually need the raid5/6 redundancy and btrfs data integrity mode aspects!) >From what I've read, *IF* the send/receive process completes without errors it should make a reasonably reliable backup. The problem is that there's a lot of error-triggering corner-cases ATM, and given your definitely non-standard use-case, I expect your chances of running into such errors is higher than normal. But if send/receive /does/ complete without errors, AFAIK it should be a reliable replication. Meanwhile, over time those corner-cases should be worked out, and I've seen nothing in your use-case that says it /shouldn't/ work, once send/ receive itself is working reliably. Your use-case may be an odd corner- case, but it should either work or not, and once btrfs send/receive is working reliably, based on all I've read both from you and on the list in general, your case too should work reliably. =:^) But for the moment, unless you're aim is to be a guinea pig working closely with the devs to test an interesting corner-case and report problems so they can be traced and fixed, I'd suggest using some other method. Give btrfs send/receive, and the filesystem as a whole, another six months or a year to mature and stabilize, and AFAIK your suggested method might not be the most efficient or recommended way to do things for the reasons others have given, but it should none-the-less work. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman -- 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
