CAVEAT : WORK IN PROGRESS

I'm using rsnapshot-backup which is basically a wrapper around rsnapshot.

It uses one setup per system to backup with one config, exclude and script file. There are also individual backup and logging directories. There is a scheduler which parallelizes backup runs and a configuration frontend using template files to create the backup jobs.

There is also an enabling mechnism using symlinks.

A typical backup job configuration (created with rsnapshot-backup-conf) consists of:

/etc/rsnapshot-backup.d/conf.<BACKUP-CLIENT>
/etc/rsnapshot-backup.d/exclude.<BACKUP-CLIENT>
/etc/rsnapshot-backup.d/script.<BACKUP-CLIENT>    # optional
/etc/rsnapshot-backup.d/enabled/conf.<BACKUP-CLIENT> -> ../conf.<BACKUP-CLIENT>

/backup/hosts/<BACKUP-CLIENT>/daily.0/
/backup/hosts/<BACKUP-CLIENT>/zfs-snapshots -> daily.0/.zfs/snapshot

/var/log/rsnapshot-backup/<BACKUP-CLIENT>/

<ZPOOL>/backup/hosts/<BACKUP-CLIENT> # ZFS filesystem mounted on /backup/hosts/<BACKUP-CLIENT>/daily.0/

This example has been created using Debian 9.3 .

Inside /etc/rsnapshot-backup.d/conf.template:

cmd_cp        /bin/true
cmd_preexec   /usr/sbin/rsnapshot-zfs-helper /etc/rsnapshot-backup.d/enabled/conf.<HOST> preexec
cmd_postexec  /usr/sbin/rsnapshot-zfs-helper /etc/rsnapshot-backup.d/enabled/conf.<HOST> postexec

Do NOT replace '<HOST>' here!

Inside /etc/rsnapshot-backup.d/conf:

storage_backend=zfs_snapshots
zfs_helper=/usr/sbin/rsnapshot-zfs-helper
zfs_zpool=<ZPOOL>
zfs_dataset_prefix=backup/hosts/