I’ve already written about my migration from rsync hardlink based backup to BTRFS snapshots for backup.

Since then, I’ve been running both backup methods in parallel, to decide later which one performs the best. After 4 onths, it’s time to draw a conclusion.

With BTRFS the backups took slightly less time, but the bigger difference is when performing accesses over all the file set:

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# time du -sh server.btrfs
1.7T    server.btrfs
du -sh server.btrfs 11.58s user 201.40s system 38% cpu 9:06.18 total
# time du -sh server.rsync
118G    server.rsync
du -sh server.rsync 19.85s user 209.97s system 7% cpu 50:12.90 total

So in the end the rsync hardlink based backup scripts will be retired, and the BTRFS solution will be kept.