Creating an Incremental Backup

The following instructions describe how to create an incremental backup by using the send/receive feature. Note that before creating an incremental backup, you must first create a reference backup. See Creating a Reference Backup in Preparation for Creating an Incremental Backup.

To create an incremental backup:

  1. Create a snapshot of the subvolume.
    sudo btrfs subvolume snapshot -r /vol /vol/backup_1
  2. Ensure that the snapshot has been written to disk by running the sync command.
    sudo sync
  3. Send only the differences between the reference backup and the new backup to the backup area.

    For example:, run

    sudo btrfs send -p /vol/backup_0 /vol/backup_1 | btrfs receive /backupvol

    Running the previous command creates the /backupvol/backup_1 subvolume.