How to move snapshots to ssd

I googled around a bit but I couldn’t find a mention somewhere on how to move snapshots to SSD (which is already installed) and if ssd needs to be in some special fs (atm I have ext4).

Thanks for any help on this.

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Snapshots require btrfs (ext4 doesn’t support live snapshotting).

this not the reply.
when i format any media to btrfs, how to move?

This is the only piece of information I found:

You can mount subvolume and use cp if target fs isn’t btrfs. You can use the same thing on btrfs, but also you can use btrfs send and receave. See documentation: https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Manpage/btrfs-receive https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Manpage/btrfs-send

Thanks cynerd + einar for you answers but that’s not what I’m looking for. I understand now that I can reformat my SSD to btrfs (as it’s still unused it’s no big deal) and then I could use send/receive commands.

But what I want to know is: Is there a simple way of setting the destination of a snapshot not to be on the source disk. So that schnapps will save it’s snapshots not to flash memory but to the ssd? So I don’t necessarily want to preserve the existing snapshots but much more relieve flash memory writes and put future snapshots to the ssd.

Storing snapshots to different location isn’t possible to my knowledge. There might be possibility of RAID1 usage so you would have mirror as backup but having fs somewhere and snapshots else where is not possible. It goes against technology it self. What exactly is your idea of gaining?

Space? Can’t you just use ssd as secondary fs where you put all your files? If you format it to btrfs than you can easily use snapshots there as well and have an advantage that data snapshots are not dependent on OS.

Write cycles? Let me explain little bit how snapshots work in broad sense. File systems are dividing files to blocks. Whole FS is managed on top of those blocks. What btrfs does when you create new snapshot is that it notes all current blocks as part of that snapshot (it’s single operation as they are in tree/list structure). If you do changes after snapshots, those changes in reality just use new block. So snapshot creation adds no writes (if we ignore those few writes to update index of FS with new subvolume).

I don’t see any other reason why you would want to separate snapshots from fs. And solution for backing up old snapshots you already have.

Dd copy the dev devices.
Mostly works for me for mounted fs.

Yes i know, its not a snapshot, but only takes about 8gig…

Or backup your confs to the omnia medkit (rescue thing) image.

Or I think you can manipulate the schnapps script :slight_smile:

If not already known, but maybe LXC containers on mSATA drive (Citation: "This simple tutorial describes, how to set installation of LXC containers on the mSATA disk, which is recommended for not to wear out the internal FLASH memory. " can give you a hint.

This post may help > Simple Schnapps Backup Script