Btrfs as a home user - why?

[2000]

@dalto

You can absolutely use them as backups via snapshot replication. It is one of the most efficient ways to do backups.

@Beardedgeek72

2. Snapshots are not incremental? REALLY bad.
3. Must put snapshot on the same drive as the data it takes snapshot of? Then what is the point?

@Beardedgeek72
Your initial points 2 and 3 are actually moot,
As @dalto already correctly implied, snapshots aren’t necessarily restricted to the same device.

[Discussion]

With btrfs’s send and receive commands you can replicate a snapshot on a different filesystem. The command operates in two modes: full and incremental. In the incremental mode, previously sent snapshots that are available on both the sending and receiving side can be used to reduce the amount of information that has to be sent to reconstruct the sent snapshot on a different filesystem; much like rsync in non-btrfs Timeshift.

It’s just a btrfs feature that Timeshift doesn’t make use of. But you could still send/receive snapshots created by Timeshift manually if you wanted to.