Note the article seems to be considering desktop/laptop systems. If you're backing up a server running a database you have another whole set of problems, but ge

Note the article seems to be considering desktop/laptop systems. If you're backing up a server running a database you have another whole set of problems, but generally you won't need PIT snapshot semantics from the filesystem. You get that from the database's storage engine (e.g. via write ahead logging). Backup in that context is done in cahoots with the storage engine such that a consistent-after-recovery set of filesystem data is backed up. Databases such as Oracle, SQLServer and PostgreSQL existed long before filesystems with consistent snapshot capability were common.