@Marenz hello again.
No and No.
Although it does use snapshots itself. The docs need to be improved on this feature and I have some almost finished technical wiki docs to publish on the forum when I get time from when I last worked in that area of the code.
Rockstor’s replication system aims to replicate a share, btrfs subvol, and does it by snapshotting that share and then using btrfs send receive to send that snapshot to the target Rockstor system. On running a second time it takes another snapshot and sends the difference from the first snapshot (from my now fuzzy memory of this) and keeps doing this but will ‘tidy’ up old snapshots so that once it reaches a stable state (after 5 replication events) you will see the final state that it then maintains.
It’s actually a fair complex process and there is some non trivial bits of code to accomplish this.
So I would advise that you setup a small share and let it go through 5 to 6 replication events (if the share is small you could schedule them to be quite often) and take a look at the replication specific snapshot names that are created at each stage. And note that after the very first replication event you will have a strangely named share (actually a snapshot), ignore it, it will be auto removed after the second or 3 subsequent replication event. And don’t delete any of these obviously named shares as that will break the replication and you will have to start it over.
Replication worked when I last check in our latest Stable release and in our last CentOS based ISO release, but is broken in our now deprecated, but otherwise working CentOS testing channel release. It was one of the reasons we never released a stable at the end of the CentOS testing channel. 3.9.1-16 would have been released as 3.9.2 stable and put out to ISO but replication and a few other things were just broken so we continued on with the relevant fixes in the Stable Channel.
I don’t see why not, as long as your /home is btrfs; assuming you are suggesting btrfs send recieve here. You would have to set things up so that the target was understood by Rockstor, ie an existing share and you put snapshots in a location understood by Rockstor. It’s actually going to be quite tricky come to think of it and I’m afraid I won’t have time with all that is required for the move to help much at all with this. But you can always look at the mount points used by Rockstor and setup your send receive accordingly. This will all be command line stuff however, you are not likely going to be able to tie this into the Rockstor to Rockstor replication as it uses it’s messaging system etc. But if you are doing plain btrfs stuff, and your resulting subvols (which includes snapshots) are understood by Rockstor then your should be good.
Would be a fantastic feature to have a Web-UI initiated ‘receive my btrfs /home’ type setup that ended up prompting your to enter stuff on the client and you would then be done. Oh how we can dream, but the priority of that feature is likely to put it into the distant future with our current backlog of issues.
Hope the helps.