It was very frequent (around every 5 minutes) because what I was trying to get was a failsafe in case I delete or otherwise mess up a file I was currently worki

It was very frequent (around every 5 minutes) because what I was trying to get was a failsafe in case I delete or otherwise mess up a file I was currently working on. It happened exactly once since I disabled snapshots of /home and I was able to recover it from the terminal's scrollback buffer of all places. :) As far as I know btrfs does get slower as the number of snapshots increase. Not sure about zfs in that regard. Your plan does sound sensible. I have a feeling you could make the snapshots even more frequent without any ill effects.