Some filesystems have features for creating snapshots of the whole of the filesystem or parts of it, and for serializing those snapshot and diffs between them i

Some filesystems have features for creating snapshots of the whole of the filesystem or parts of it, and for serializing those snapshot and diffs between them in a form that allows streaming reconstruction of exact logical state elsewhere. My slightly elaborate backup/sync requirements made me a big fan of btrfs. Some other things one may care about even on desktop are compression, corruption detection, and deduplication.