External Drive for Snapshots? And how can I speed it up?

snapd
1

I set up a cron job to create a snapshot of my Nextcloud installation. It works well, but the snapshot size is 2 TB. My hard drive is only 4 TB, and of course, the Nextcloud installation is 2 TB of that. So once the snapshot is created, my hard drive is full.

Can we have a way to store the snapshot on an external drive as it is created? Then I wouldn’t have to run a cron job to move the file to another drive after creation. Plus, if the size grows at all, it won’t fit on my drive any longer!

The other downside is that the creation process is about 10 hours. I also need about 1 hour to move the 2 TB file it creates. Unfortunately, I don’t have 11 hours of the day when the Nextcloud server is idle. I really can’t reduce the Nextcloud size to make it faster. I wish the snapshots were incremental! Any suggestions?

2

If anyone is reading this and looking for an answer, I decided to use Restic to backup /var/snap/ and hope I can extract information from that when needed. I set up a cron job to stop snap, run restic, and then start snap again. This gets me incremental backups, I can set a retention period with Restic, and allows me to run this quickly, even with a large amount of data to backup.

3

Another option is borg. I used borg backup to a remote server, and it works similarly to restic, and rsnapshot. Delta backups are nice and quick!