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Yep. We use rsnapshot with btrfs snapshots on Debian / Ubuntu. You can set up multiple generations easily. Efficient storage using hard links.

Very reliable.

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AFAIK the crucial part of this, is rsync's `--link-dest=DIR` parameter, which hard-links an unmodified file to the respective place in "DIR", rather than making a copy.

The docs for my version of rsnapshot say not to use '--link-dest' if GNU cp is available, because the script will use 'cp -l' instead when copying "daily-1" to "daily-0" (for example). This is before it will overwrite "daily-0" with new files via rsync.

Could you elaborate on where the btrfs snapshots come into play? I use rsnapshot on a plain ext4 fs and it’s pretty slow (lots of small files).

The snapshots don't help with the speed.

Instead, they make sure the files aren't changing / being deleted between when the rsync starts and finishes.

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