Maintenance :: Refs File Systems - Preparations For Backups?

test the Refs file system -- it won't yet be available on the boot system but will be on other volumes.

This will mean a change in your backup strategy if you back up disks by Imaging partitions. It will be a while yet before the standard backup vendors build this new file system into their backups - but whatever the change of data format in the partition layout you should still always be able to backup if you select "Backup by SECTOR" mode - as this mode simply copies byte for byte exactly what is on the disk without regard to data organisation whatever - it's a pure physical address sector by sector copy. It will probably take longer but it should always work.

(Although I'll be running this on a VM which can be backed up in other ways - I want to try the actual sector by sector backup from the Guest machine).

In theory though as most backup solutions are Linux based any sort of Windows file systems are just DATA as far as Linux itself is concerned - however sometimes these utilities do a bit of data compression and optimisation which requires knowing details of the SOURCE file system - usually FAT / FAT32 / NTFS. This could cause problems with the new Refs file system so I'd go for the physical sector by sector dump.

In any case while I'm sure we are all waiting to test the new file system - don't rely on it on any machine until your BACKUP and RESTORE strategy works.