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.

Another option would be to straight up tar bzip the drive, or at least select directories like /home and /etc.

And lastly, just straight up use dd or clonezilla to create a snapshot. But I want to be able to mount it and view the files though.

What do you think?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Do you have things on the external that precludes you formatting it? You aren't doing it too often, so a tarball might work, but you'll be wasting a lot of time doing it that way. Then again, if it's once a month, that doesn't seem like a huge deal. I just use rsync now and then for my external backup and it doesn't take long at all.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Yeah, but since my external drive is formatted in exFAT, I can't simply rsync to it. I gotta either partition it, or create a mountable ext4 filesystem image on which I can.