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Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux

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Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux

#161

Post by pmarreck »

tombert wrote: post #140
pmarreck wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine installing an entirely new window manager without issue, and then undoing it without issue. NixOS does that. And I'm pretty sure that no other flavor of Linux does. First time I realized I could just blithely "shop around window managers" simply by changing a couple of configuration lines, I was absolutely floored. NixOS is the first Linux distro that made me actually feel like I was free to enjoy and tinker…

Completely agree; being able to transparently know what the system is going to do by just looking at a few lines of text is sort of game-changing. It's trivial to add and remove services, and you can be assured that you actually added and removed them, instead of just being "pretty sure" about it. Obviously this is just opinion (no need for someone to supply nuance) but from my perspective the NixOS model is so obvio…

> but from my perspective the NixOS model is so obviously the "correct" way of doing an OS that it really annoys me that it's not the standard for every operating system

- Literally every person who's read the Nix paper and drank the kool-aid thinks this lol.

I STILL don't completely understand every element of my nix config but it's still quite usable. Adding software requires adding it to the large-ish config file, largely because I created overlay namespaces of "master.programname", "unstable.programname" and "stable.programname" (with the default being "unstable" in my case) but those would all ideally be moved out into 2 text files, 1 for system level (maybe called system_packages.txt) and one for a named user (perhaps called _packages.txt) and if those could be imported somehow into the configuration.nix, I think that would make things a bit easier for end-users, at least initially.

The commandline UI (even the newer `nix` one) could still use an overhaul IMHO. The original CL utils were CLEARLY aimed directly at Nix developers, and not so much at end-users...

I've been working on my own wrapper to encapsulate the most common use-cases I need the underlying TUI for https://github.com/pmarreck/ixnay < and that's it so far.

Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux

#162

Post by Vogtinator »

Arnavion wrote: post #47
Spunkie wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a feature I've really been missing since switching from grub to systemd-boot. Has anyone figured out an easy way to get this back with systemd-boot?

Some time ago they did add systemd-boot as a supported option and apparently it also generates one entry per snapshot. https://news.opensuse.org/2024/03/05/systemd-boot-integratio... https://en.opensuse.org/Systemd-boot#Installation_with_full_... https://github.com/openSUSE/sdbootutil I haven't tried it though so I don't know for sure. (I have my own custom systemd-boot setup that predates theirs, and since my setup…

I'm using Tumbleweed with btrfs snapshots, systemd-boot and transparent disk encryption (using TPM + measured boot), works fine.

Currently this needs to be set up semi-manually (select some options in the installer, then run some commands after install), but it'll be automatic soon.

Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux

#164

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #160
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, different strokes I guess. Maybe it's just that too much kubernetes has gone to my head, but I see files as ephemeral. Code and docs are in source control. My phone syncs images to PCloud when I take them. Anything I download is backed up... wherever I downloaded it from.

Cloud sync != backup. Cloud sync won't help if you accidentally delete the file, backups will. Cloud sync won't help if you make an undesired edit, backups will.

But I can just rebuild the file, or restore it from a previous commit (or if I'm having a particularly bad day, restore its inputs from a previous commit and _then_ rebuild it).

Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux

#165

Post by tombert »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #159
tombert wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's definitely true, but maybe I've just been lucky, pretty much every proprietary program I've wanted to install in NixOS has been in Nixpkgs. Skype, Steam, and Lightworks are all directly available in the repos and seem to work fine as far as I can tell. I'm sure there are proprietary packages that don't work or aren't in the repo, but I haven't really encountered them.

I've unfortunately encountered a few. TotalPhase's Data Center software for their USB protocol analyzers is my current annoyance, someday I'll figure out how to get it to work but thus far it's been easier to just dedicate a second laptop to it.

I am hoping that Flakes will work to fix this problem somewhat; at least in theory it can be a situation of "get it to work once then it'll work forever", and then trivially distributed later (even without a blessing from Nixpkgs).

Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux

#166

Post by _flux »

Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote: post #154
_flux wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also use lvm2 and then you get atomic snapshots with any file system (I think it needs to support fsfreeze, I guess all of them do).

lvm requires unallocated space in the volume which makes it kind of garbage to use for snapshots

Personally I've never found this to be issue, as I increase volume sizes base on need, not allocate 100% from the get-go. The space needed for short-lived snapshots is not that big, though that of course can depend on the system.

This also helps dealing with run-away (or long running) processes eating disk space, as you always have some extra space set aside..

Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux

#167

Post by electroly »

bongobingo1 wrote: post #73
pixelmonkey wrote: post #38

I've probably spent way too much time thinking about Linux backup over the years. But thankfully, I found a setup that works really well for me in 2018 or so, used it for the last few years, and I wrote up a detailed blog post about it just a month ago: https://amontalenti.com/2024/06/19/backups-restic-rclone The tools I use on Linux for backup are restic + rclone, storing my restic repo on a speedy USB3 SSD. For off…

Do you have much of an opinion on why you went with Restic over Borg? The single Go binary is an obvious one, perhaps that alone is enough. I remember some people having un-bound memory usage with Restic but that might have been a very old version.

I choose restic over borg for the simple reason that restic can back up directly to S3-compatible cloud storage and borg can't. Commodity S3-compatible storage is cheaper than borg-compatible cloud storage. I back up to both B2 ($0.006/GB) and S3 (Intelligent Tiering, ~$0.004/GB) and the two combined are still cheaper than rsync.net ($0.012/GB). I don't see that borg is any better than restic, so this seems to be a straightforward win to me. I'd trust restic with my life. It's among the highest quality software I've ever used.

Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux

#168

Post by fulafel »

Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote: post #154
_flux wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also use lvm2 and then you get atomic snapshots with any file system (I think it needs to support fsfreeze, I guess all of them do).

lvm requires unallocated space in the volume which makes it kind of garbage to use for snapshots

Only a little (as much as data will change during the backup). And default filesystems nowadays support resizing downwards so you can make space after initial partitioning.

Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux

#169

Post by Am4TIfIsER0ppos »

fulafel wrote: post #168
Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lvm requires unallocated space in the volume which makes it kind of garbage to use for snapshots

Only a little (as much as data will change during the backup). And default filesystems nowadays support resizing downwards so you can make space after initial partitioning.

You have to know in advance to not allocate 100% to root and home otherwise you are SOL when you want to make space later. If you're lucky you can disable swap and temporarily use its allocation to do it, providing that is large enough for the changes.

Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux

#170

Post by prmoustache »

nurettin wrote: post #137
prmoustache wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you "botch" upgrades so many times? I may have had only one update that went wrong in 30 years of using Linux and that was just a bug introduced by a gfx driver in a new minor kernel version. I downgraded it and waited for the bug to be fixed upstream and that was it.

bravo, I guess?

That is not on me but the distro maintainers. They do a really good job imho and it appart from kernel drivers issue or hardware failure (drive) it is hard to break a distrib.
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