BTRFS and snapshots

General system Newbie
1

I’ve used Garuda for a bit, and want to go back to EndeavourOS since it runs my games better,
the minimalism, and also of course the lovely forum ;). (in particular, Roblox thru grapejuice)

What I do like is that Garuda takes snapshots pre and post upgrade and install of packages thru snapper. AFAIK BTRFS is an option in the installer.

How do I do this?

Is it a “just works thing”? (I highly doubt that).

Also: for some reason if I copy paste the instructions at aur.chaotic.cx (to add the chaotic-aur before i even start setting up) pacman-key goes awry.

2

If you want a setup similar to garuda’s you can do the install and select btrfs.

Post install, install btrfs-assistant and snapper-support.

If you must do this, do it post install. Doing it from the live ISO won’t help you at all.

2 Likes
3

OK.

Thanks for the help. About to nuke my “trial” endeavourOS install (i call it a trial install to test if roblox was stuttering on endeavourOS and Garuda dr460nized.

image

It keeps bugging me about my EFI partition not being big enough when I do manual partitioning (to use btrfs) but not when I use the replace a partition (which uses ext4)

Is the WBM (Windwoes boot manager) partition big enough, considering it works in replace mode?

obviously the 60 GiB is for endeavourOS lol

also the wbm partition will be mounted to /boot/efi

edit 2: I’ll say go with it, I have almost nothing to lose.

EDIT 3: It IS enough. Check here, readers from the future!

Edit 4: I still don’t get an option to restore snapshots from GRUB. Is that possible or Yet Another Garuda Hack? lol

Edit 5: When I installed and ran update-grub it seems that it detected snapshots. I’ll see when I reboot.

1 Like
4

By the way opensuse also does this automatically.

5

Hmm…

6

Of course they do. Snapper comes from opensuse in the first place. :smile:

That being said, their implementation is very different. They use the default subvolume feature of btrfs to actually change what the root is pointing at.

1 Like
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To be honest that’s the only way I know of. Didn’t know EOS did it a different way.

8

EOS uses a flat layout with the default subvolume being left at the root of the filesystem. The root subvol is named @ and the home subvol is named @home. This is partially because timeshift requires all four of those things to function.

How you setup snapshots and restores is entirely left to the end-user.