rsnapshot vs zfs / btrfs snapshots

Solution 1:

It is a working scheme, but in order to make yourself even more comfy you could actually store data on zfs. This will give the following advantages:

• you will be capable of creating snapshots exactly at the place where you need them - this eliminates the need to transport data back during recovery procedure
• you will be capable of backing up to a second host using incremental snapshots, and this, in its turn, means that a) this is faster b) unlike incremental archive bundles, incremental snapshot will add data to the existing piece, instead of just laying on the disk in one piece and waiting to be extracted in sequence in order to receive full copy c) you will automatically have two sets of snapshots - one on the main host and another on second one
• you won't need to account the time needed for rsync to sync resources for the snapshot creation to start after rsync finishes, to get a consistent snapshot state (often this can be not that vital, but anyway, one reason less to bother).

Solution 2:

Have a look at btrbk. Basically what the previous poster did write can be done with btrfs also. Btrbk will automate it for you. The speed difference between the rsync based rsnapshot and the btrfs send/receive based btrbk is very convincing. Because it is so easy I have a cron job which makes hourly backups now.