Btrbk is a backup tool for btrfs subvolumes, taking advantage of btrfs specific capabilities to create atomic snapshots and transfer them incrementally to your backup locations. Btrbk is a single Perl script, and does not require any special installation procedures or libraries.
The source and target locations are specified in a config file, which allows to easily configure simple scenarios like “laptop with locally attached backup disks”, as well as more complex ones, e.g. “server receiving backups from several hosts via ssh, with different retention policies”.
Btrbk is designed to run as a cron job for triggering periodic snapshots and backups, as well as from the command line (e.g. for instantly creating additional snapshots).
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Atomic snapshots.
- Incremental backups.
- Flexible retention policy.
- Backups to multiple destinations.
- Transfer via ssh.
- Robust recovery from interrupted backups (for removable and mobile devices).
- Archive to offline storage.
- Encrypted backups to non-btrfs storage.
- Wildcard subvolumes (useful for docker and lxc containers).
- Transaction log.
- Comprehensive list and statistics output.
- Resolve and trace btrfs parent-child and received-from relationships.
- List file changes between backups.
- Calculate accurate disk space usage based on block regions.
Website: github.com/digint/btrbk
Support:
Developer: Axel Burri
License: GNU General Public License v3.0

Btrbk is written in Perl. Learn Perl with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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Related Software
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Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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