Take snapshots of your btrfs subvolumes and apply a retention policy in order to keep your snapshot directory somewhat clean and small.

The retention policy, defined bellow, is hardcoded for now but it should be enought for the average use case. I may adjust it, or provide a way to change it at runtime if needed.

• Hourly snapshots are kept for 24 hours
• Daily snapshots are kept for 4 weeks
• Weekly snapshots are kept for 12 weeks
• Monthly snapshots are kept for a year
• yearly snapshots are kept for 10 years

Every subvolume that should be snapshoted must be given as argument to the script. For example if you want to snapshot every home directory created as subvolumes and your /etc and /srv directory you would do

btrfs-simple-snapshots /home/* /etc /srv

Once done, you will find a new subvolume named .snapshots inside the snapshoted subvolume with a name formated as %Y-%m-%d-%H%M%S

Install from pip using pip install btrfs-simple-snapshots. Then you can run it as root or with a user able to manage btrfs subvolumes. It is probably a good thing to run it automatically with a cron job. Depending on you need you may run it once per day (at 2 a.m.) to snapshot every home folder (created as subvolumes) with this kind of job definition.

0 2 * * * python -m btrfs_simple_snapshots /home/*