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Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux

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Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux

#21

Post by twodave »

dmitrygr wrote: post #9

> similar to the System Restore feature in Windows and the Time Machine tool in Mac OS This makes no sense! System Restore is a useless wart that just wastes time making "restore points" at every app/driver install and can rarely (if ever) produce a working system when used to "restore" anything. It does not back up user data at all. Time Machine is a whole-system backup solution that seems to work quite well and doe…

My main use of system restore was to return to a “clean” install + just the bare minimum installs I needed back when windows was more likely to atrophy over time. I agree it is mostly useless today.

Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux

#22

Post by mbreese »

metadat wrote: post #3

Can timeshift work with ext4 filesystems? I know it won't have the atomicity of a CoW fs, but I'd be fine with that, as the important files on my systems aren't often modified, especially during a backup - I'd configure it to disable the systemd timers while the backup process is running.

Can’t you also snapshot LVM volumes directly? So if you have an LVM volume, it shouldn’t matter what the filesystem is, provided it is sync’d… in theory.

(I’ve only done this on VMs that could be paused before the snapshot, so YMMV.)

Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux

#24

Post by nijave »

mbreese wrote: post #22
metadat wrote: post #3

Can timeshift work with ext4 filesystems? I know it won't have the atomicity of a CoW fs, but I'd be fine with that, as the important files on my systems aren't often modified, especially during a backup - I'd configure it to disable the systemd timers while the backup process is running.

Can’t you also snapshot LVM volumes directly? So if you have an LVM volume, it shouldn’t matter what the filesystem is, provided it is sync’d… in theory. (I’ve only done this on VMs that could be paused before the snapshot, so YMMV.)

Yeah, you can take live snapshots with LVM. You can use wyng-backup to incrementally take and back them up somewhere outside LVM. This has been working pretty well for me to backup libvirt domains backed by LVs

Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux

#27

Post by marcus0x62 »

sschueller wrote: post #26
yuumei wrote: post #2

Has the btrfs sub volume quota bug been fixed yet? I always had issues when using it

I don't know but synology uses BTRFS now as well and if something crucial like that was broken I don't think they would support it on a NAS.

Synology uses custom extensions to BTRFS for much of their functionality.

Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux

#28

Post by somnic »

autoexecbat wrote: post #15
choward wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't tell you the number of times I see a project and think to myself "NixOS already solves that problem but better."

I've seen the configuration.nix file, it doesn't look like it captures specific versions. How does it handle snapshotting?

For managing your configuration.nix file itself you can just use whichever VCS you want, it's a text file that describes one system configuration and managing multiple versions and snapshots within that configuration file is out of scope.

For the system itself, each time you run "nixos-rebuild switch" it builds a system out of your configuration.nix, including an activation script which sets environment variables and symlinks and stops and starts services and so on, adds this new system to the grub menu, and runs the activation script. It specifically doesn't delete any of your old stuff from the nix store or grub menu, including all your older versions of packages, and your old activation scripts. So if your new system is borked you can just boot into a previous one.

Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux

#30

Post by e12e »

Hmm, this doesn't appear to be what I hoped it was:

> Timeshift is similar to applications like rsnapshot, BackInTime and TimeVault but with different goals. It is designed to protect only system files and settings. User files such as documents, pictures and music are excluded.

On the other hand, a quick search looking for "that zfs based time machine thing" did reveal a new (to me) project that looks very interesting:

https://github.com/kimono-koans/httm

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