Yet another solution that is wholly unnecessary in NixOS. Nice idea, though, since you can too easily screw up every other Linux.
Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux
51–60 of 180 posts
Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux
#52I adore Timeshift. It has made my time on Linux so much more trouble free. I have used Linux for 10+ years but over the I have spent hours, days and weeks trying to undo or fix little issues I introduce by tinkering around with things. Often I seem to break things at the worst times, right as I am starting to work on some new project or something that is time sensitive. Now, I can just roll back to an earlier stable…
While it's not quite average-user-friendly (YET), one of the reasons I switched to NixOS is because it provides this out-of-the-box. I was frustrated with every other Linux for the reasons you cite, but NixOS I can deal with, since 1) screwing up the integrity of a system install is hard to begin with, 2) if you DO manage to do it, you can reboot into any of N previous system updates (where you set N).
Linux is simultaneously the most configurable and the most brittle OS IMHO. NixOS takes away all the brittleness and leaves all the configurability, with the caveat that you have to declaratively configure it using the Nix DSL.
Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there something about your home directory that you'd want to back up that is not covered by invoking home manager as a nix module as part if nixos-rebuild? https://nix-community.github.io/home-manager/index.xhtml#sec... To me, it's better than a filesystem-backup because the things that make it into home manager tend to be exactly the things that I want to back up. The rest of it (e.g. screenshots, downloads) aren…
I want to keep snapshots of my work. I run nightly backups which have come in handy numerous times, but accessing the cloud storage is always slow, and sometimes I've even paid a few cents in bandwidth to download my own files. It would be a lot smoother if everything was local and I could grep through /.snapshots/ / .
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Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux
#54This reminds me of the default behavior of NixOS. Whenever you make a change in the configuration for NixOS and rebuild it, it takes a snapshot of the system configurations and lets you restore after a reboot if you screw something up. Similarly, it doesn't do anything in regards to user files.
I can't tell you the number of times I see a project and think to myself "NixOS already solves that problem but better."
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 with ALL of Linux at virtually no risk.
There is nothing else like it. (Except Guix. But I digress.)
Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux
#55Earlier 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."
The problem, unfortunately, is that Nix often finds itself in a chicken and egg scenario where nixpkgs fails to provide a lot of important packages or has versions that are old(er). But for there to be more investment in adding more packages, etc. you need more people using the ecosystem.
What are you talking about? Nixpkgs is one of the largest and most up-to-date distro package repos out there.
Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux
#56I just switched from windows to Mint and the first thing it asked me was to configure backups and snapshots and stuff. Pretty cool!
Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem, unfortunately, is that Nix often finds itself in a chicken and egg scenario where nixpkgs fails to provide a lot of important packages or has versions that are old(er). But for there to be more investment in adding more packages, etc. you need more people using the ecosystem.
What are you talking about? Nixpkgs is one of the largest and most up-to-date distro package repos out there.
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Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux
#58[dead]
Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux
#59I'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…
One problem with file based backups is that they are not atomic across the filesystem. If you ever back up a database (or really any application that expects atomicity while it’s running), then you might corrupt the database and lose data. This might not seem like a big problem, but can affect e.g. SQLite, which is quite popular as a file format. Then again, the likelihood that the backup will be inconsistent is fair…
Windows' Volume Shadow Copy Service[1] allows applications like databases to be informed[2] when a snapshot is about to be taken, so they can ensure their files are in a safe state. They also participate in the restore.
While Linux is great at many things, backups is one area I find lacking compared to what I'm used to from Windows. There I take frequent incremental whole-disk backups. The backup program uses the Volume Shadow Copy Service to provide a consistent state (as much as possible). Being incremental they don't take much space.
If my disk crashes I can be back up and running like (almost) nothing happened in less than an hour. Just swap out the disk and restore. I know, as I've had to do that twice.
[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/vss/the-vss-...
[2]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/vss/overview...
Re: Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux
#60I adore Timeshift. It has made my time on Linux so much more trouble free. I have used Linux for 10+ years but over the I have spent hours, days and weeks trying to undo or fix little issues I introduce by tinkering around with things. Often I seem to break things at the worst times, right as I am starting to work on some new project or something that is time sensitive. Now, I can just roll back to an earlier stable…
I enabled this four months ago and I have had the same experience.
It’s not that I couldn’t retype the config file I accidentally wrote over while tinkering, but I like the safety that comes with Timeshift to try and fail a few times.
Hard lessons come hard. This softens those lessons a little while maintaining the learning.