DEDeeg9rie9usi·Dec 7, 2025
While I don't code in perl myself, one modern tool I use a lot is written in perl: https://github.com/digint/btrbk
In Perl's decline was culturaldigint
btrbk
Perl2015–2025
digint / btrbk
btrbk
Tool for creating snapshots and remote backups of btrfs subvolumes
7Distinct people
7Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
2.2KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Tool for creating snapshots and remote backups of btrfs subvolumes
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year7 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2015-06-10 09:45:00 UTC to 2025-12-07 11:54:40 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
What Hacker News says
7 sourcesYes, it's worth having ~hourly snapshots of your machine, using something like: https://github.com/digint/btrbk
In NixOS 25.11 releasedLVM snapshots + rsnapshot, saved on btrfs disks on each server, then btrbk[1] for pulling backups to remote storage.
[1] https://github.com/digint/btrbk
In Ask HN: What do you use to backup your VMs?For anyone using btrfs on their system, I heartily recommend btrbk, which has served me very well for making incremental backups with a customizable retention period: https://github.com/digint/btrbk
In The various scripts I use to back up my home computers using SSH and rsyncFor small scale, use Dropbox or Google Drive, or whatever, because for small scale the most important part of backup is actually reliably having it done. If you rely on manual process, you're doomed. :)
For large scale in house things: Ceph regurarly does scrubbing of the data. (Compares checksums.) and DreamHost has DreamObjects.
Thanks for mentioning borg/restic, I have never heard of them. (rsnapshot [rsync] works well, but it's not so shiny) Deduplication sounds nice. (rsnapshot uses hardlinks.)
That made me look for something btrfs based, and here's this https://github.com/digint/btrbk seems useful (send btrfs snapshots to a remote somewhere, also can be encrypted), could be useful for small setups.
In Xz format inadequate for long-term archiving (2017)Mostly local network storage which is backedup multiple times automatically, for the laptop I do manual btrfs send/receives manly to get things restored exactly the way they were.
#helps to see the fstab first
UUID=<rootfsuuid> / btrfs subvol=root 0 0
UUID=<espuuid> /boot/efi vfat umask=0077,shortname=winnt,x-systemd.automount,noauto 0 0
cd /boot
tar -acf boot-efi.tar efi/
mount <rootfsdev> /mnt
cd /mnt
btrfs sub snap -r root root.20170707
btrfs sub snap -r home home.20170707
btrfs send -p root.20170706 root.20170707 | btrfs receive /run/media/c/backup/
btrfs send -p home.20170706 home.20170707 | btrfs receive /run/media/c/backup/
cd
umount /mnt
So basically make ro snapshots of current root and home, and since they're separate subvolumes they can be done on separate
Read the rest
schedules. And then send the incremental changes to the backup volume. While only incremental is sent, the receive side has each prior backup to the new subvolume points to all of those extents and is just updated with this backups changes. Meaning I do not have to restore the increments, I just restore the most recent subvolume on the backup. I only have to keep one dated read-only snapshot on each volume, there is no "initial" backup because each subvolume is complete.
Anyway, restores are easy and fast. I can also optionally just send/receive home and do a clean install of the OS.
Related, I've been meaning to look into this project in more detail which leverages btrfs snapshots and send/receive.
https://github.com/digint/btrbk
As a heavy btrfs user backups have always been on my mind. I run a lab with a handful of busy VMs, all using btrfs. I was frustrated that there were no backup solutions (at the time) which leveraged btrfs, so I created snazzer [1] (one day soon it will support ZFS).
You might scoff, but... btrfs send/receive is insanely fast and painless. To mitigate btrfs shenanigans, snapshots end up on non-btrfs filesystems too. I wrote a tool [2] which produces PGP signatures and sha512sums of snapshots to achieve reproducible integrity measurements regardless of FS.
Of course, in the time it took to polish up snazzer a bit for public release, many [3] other [4] cool [5] solutions [6] have materialized [7]... :)
[1] https://github.com/csirac2/snazzer
[2] https://github.com/csirac2/snazzer/blob/master/doc/snazzer-m...
[3] https://github.com/masc3d/btrf