LinuxMusicians

In case you don't know, You can set btrfs to treat your home folder (or any other folder) as a completely separate subvolume. Ubuntu does this by default but it needs to be done at install time when you setup the file system. Possibly, you could create a separate subvolume for the steam folder, so that could be excluded from your backups, then you wouldn't get these huge snapshots when you start deleting games.

This video shows someone making extra subvolumes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwOnFy2HURY Later they check them with "btrfs subvolume list /" and it shows them as top level subvolumes which means they are separate.

The problem you may have had is that the subvolumes in your "root_backup" were not created as snapshots but instead made using "btrfs send" with an incremental set up. That would explain why those subvolumes were not listed as a snapshot and why no space was freed when you cleared your snapshots.

BTRFS snapshots are conceptually like a file system undo button. BTRFS send is more of an actual backup, the command is used for sending entire copies of the subvolume and can be set to be done incrementally as well. I don't know the software you use but if you have the function to send backups you just want to set that to do it on your backup drive rather than your main to avoid the problem you had.

@Largos I see. Thanks for the advice. I'll check that video out! I was using Btrfs assistant but I think I'll try Timeshift for snapshots next time. At the moment I'm just using Timeshift Rsync backups of system files like I used to and so I think I'll stick with that for a bit and then play with Btrfs snapshots again at a later date

Death wrote: ↑Sat Jan 07, 2023 12:03 am

I'm sure you can set Timeshift to backup your home folder if you like though..

Using Timeshift for /home backups could be disastrous: All your projects will be overwritten with earlier versions, and new ones simply deleted, if you need to do a system restore, and forget to exclude /home from the proceedings.

For /home backups I run rsync from a script, with an exclude list to exclude things like /downloads, /.cache, /.steam....

Impostor wrote: ↑Mon Jan 09, 2023 3:47 pm

For /home backups I run rsync from a script, with an exclude list to exclude things like /downloads, /.cache, /.steam....

Same here. Been using rsync for /home backups for years and it's been very reliable. Also use fsarchiver to save a system partition backup regularly.
One needs to be confident in the integrity of backups. I've read a few success stories with btrfs, but enough issues to put me off considering using it.

I'm not using Timeshift to backup the home folder, only system files. I use a separate program for the home folder..