I have a small server that I use as a NAS, it has a few services running on it and a number of files that it stores.
It is configured as RAID1 with two SSDs, formatted with btrfs.
I use apt-btrfs-snapshot
, which creates snapshots each time an apt operation is performed. This all works fine for recovering from bad configuration changes - but I'd also like to copy those snapshots to some external backup target to use them for recovery if the server completely dies.
My question: suppose I have a recent btrfs snapshot of the root directory of this machine. To recover it, can I do a fresh install of Ubuntu (with the same hardware), copy across the snapshot, and then tell apt-btrfs-snapshot
to "rollback" to that snapshot? Effectively I'm copying verbatim the entire root filesystem from a different but similar system. I would have thought this should be OK, as long as I keep the permissions the same then all the installed applications and configuration files should bring back the backed-up system exactly as it was at the time of the snapshot. I'm thinking I might try this out in a VM just to check, but are there any issues with copying a root filesystem to restore a whole machine?