my line for snapshots
btrfs subvolume snapshot /source/drive/folder/ /source/drive/folder/.snapshots/snapshot-`date +"%Y-%m-%d-at-%I-%M%P"`
this will create a snapshot with date and time attached to the snapshot name
you can more info here
https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/SysadminGuide#Managi...
make sure to remember to delete old snapshots, otherwise you'll run out of disk space and not know where it went
performance during snapshot creation/deletes (presumably mostly the deletes) is one of the reasons I personally stopped using btrfs on my desktop. Now using ZFS root (with Ubuntu devel).
I had auto hourly snapshots and sometimes when it deleted one my entire system would hang for a few seconds and occasionally 10s of seconds.
Having said that I do suspect that might be partially related to also using ecryptfs on top, but still.
Slightly off topic. I chose btrfs as my main filesystem recently on a system running Ubuntu/Xubuntu. I have done some research on backing up (with the advantage of snapshots) but it looks like there aren't (m)any graphical tools (this gets a little more confusing with /@ and /@home subvolumes on the same partition being treated separately for snapshots, AFAIK).
Do you manage it all from the command line and/or do you have any suggestions for graphical tools to do "as-is clones of entire partitions" (and also incremental backups) to local external drives (not over the network)? Or if you could point to any great documentation or blog posts on this topic, that'd be helpful too (I have read some bits of the btrfs wiki and the btrfs parts in the Arch wiki).
Currently I'm doing a plain rsync using Grsync, and not really taking advantage of btrfs features like snapshots.
The main reason I'm looking at avoiding the command line is to make it easier for others around me to use it.