btrfs-receive(8) - Man pages

BTRFS-RECEIVE(8) BTRFS BTRFS-RECEIVE(8)

NAME
btrfs-receive - receive subvolumes from send stream

SYNOPSIS
btrfs receive [options] <path>

btrfs receive --dump [options]

DESCRIPTION
Receive a stream of changes and replicate one or more subvolumes that
were previously generated by btrfs send. The received subvolumes are
stored to path, unless --dump option is given.

If --dump option is specified, btrfs receive will only do the validation
of the stream, and print the stream metadata, one operation per line.

btrfs receive will fail in the following cases:

1. receiving subvolume already exists

2. previously received subvolume has been changed after it was received

3. default subvolume has changed or you didn't mount the filesystem at
the toplevel subvolume

A subvolume is made read-only after the receiving process finishes suc-
cessfully (see BUGS below).

Options

-f <FILE>
read the stream from FILE instead of stdin,

-C|--chroot
confine the process to path using ]8;;https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/chroot.1.html\chroot(1)]8;;\

-e terminate after receiving an end cmd marker in the stream.

Without this option the receiver side terminates only in case of
an error on end of file.

-E|--max-errors <NERR>
terminate as soon as NERR errors occur while stream processing
commands from the stream

Default value is 1. A value of 0 means no limit.

-m <ROOTMOUNT>
the root mount point of the destination filesystem

By default the mount point is searched in :-
file:/proc/self/mounts`. If /proc is not accessible, e.g. in a
chroot environment, use this option to tell us where this
filesystem is mounted.

--force-decompress
if the stream contains compressed data (see --compressed-data in
btrfs-send(8)), always decompress it instead of writing it with
encoded I/O

--dump dump the stream metadata, one line per operation

Does not require the path parameter. The filesystem remains un-
changed. Each stream command is on one line in the form of
key=value and separated by one or more spaces. Values that con-
tain special characters (like paths or extended attributes) are
encoded in C-like way, e.g. '\n' or octal escape sequence like
'\NNN' where N is the char value. Same encoding as is used in
/proc files.

-q|--quiet
(deprecated) alias for global -q option

-v (deprecated) alias for global -v option

Global options

-v|--verbose
increase verbosity about performed actions, print details about
each operation

-q|--quiet
suppress all messages except errors

BUGS
btrfs receive sets the subvolume read-only after it completes success-
fully. However, while the receive is in progress, users who have write
access to files or directories in the receiving path can add, remove, or
modify files, in which case the resulting read-only subvolume will not
be an exact copy of the sent subvolume.

If the intention is to create an exact copy, the receiving path should
be protected from access by users until the receive operation has com-
pleted and the subvolume is set to read-only.

Additionally, receive does not currently do a very good job of validat-
ing that an incremental send stream actually makes sense, and it is thus
possible for a specially crafted send stream to create a subvolume with
reflinks to arbitrary files in the same filesystem. Because of this,
users are advised to not use btrfs receive on send streams from un-
trusted sources, and to protect trusted streams when sending them across
untrusted networks.

EXIT STATUS
btrfs receive returns a zero exit status if it succeeds. Non zero is re-
turned in case of failure.

AVAILABILITY
btrfs is part of btrfs-progs. Please refer to the documentation at ]8;;https://btrfs.readthedocs.io\-
https://btrfs.readthedocs.io]8;;\.