BTRFS *could* be used as a good strategy, because:
- its send recieve mechanism is a good tool to send data around (similar to rsync in classical bakup setups), though this peculiar feature is still considerednexperimental for now.
- its COW and snapshotting-for-free greatly simplifies managing the historical copies (a little bit like locally using rsync with hardlinks, but much easier and more tansparent)
- it alsi reduces a bit space requirements (in part because it's cow reflinks can store delta between 2 versions of the files instead of 2 separate copies of changed fies like the rsync+hardlink method. And in part because of transparent compression) which means more backup history saved in the same server size.
And yes, RAID alone isn't a backup strategy, only a contingency plan in case of hardware failre. It's part of the solution, not the whole sokution.
- its send recieve mechanism is a good tool to send data around (similar to rsync in classical bakup setups), though this peculiar feature is still considerednexperimental for now.
- its COW and snapshotting-for-free greatly simplifies managing the historical copies (a little bit like locally using rsync with hardlinks, but much easier and more tansparent)
- it alsi reduces a bit space requirements (in part because it's cow reflinks can store delta between 2 versions of the files instead of 2 separate copies of changed fies like the rsync+hardlink method. And in part because of transparent compression) which means more backup history saved in the same server size.
And yes, RAID alone isn't a backup strategy, only a contingency plan in case of hardware failre. It's part of the solution, not the whole sokution.