Btrfs Assistant 1.0 is coming, testers needed

General system Community contributions
12

Yes, they can be added at any time. You can also make the installer add them if you want to by editing the config before installing.

That being said, you definitely don’t want to try to match my screenshot. Some of that stuff is just for testing purposes. :wink:

If you want the instructions for a fully functional setup with automatic snapshots and snpahot booting I will try to provide the steps from memory. Hopefully I am not missing any steps.

After installing with btrfs selected as the filesystem:

  • Install snap-pac, snapper, grub-btrfs and btrfs-assistant
  • Open Btrfs Assistant
    • Switch to the “Snapper Settings” tab
    • Click on the “New Config” button
    • Name the config “root” and choose / as the mountpoint
    • Click the “Save Config” button
    • Set the retention limits you want. In particular you probably want to lower the amount of “Number” snapshots that are retained. These are the snapshots that are taken when pacman runs. It takes 2 snapshots in each run so something like 10 is probably a more reasonable number. That will give you 5 pacman runs. The timeline settings are entirely left to your preferences.
    • Select the checkboxes for snapper-timeline and snapper-cleanup and click the “Apply” button to the right of the checkboxes.
  • Add support for booting off read-only snapshots
    • Edit /etc/mkinitcpio.conf and add grub-btrfs-overlayfs to the end of the HOOKS section
    • Rebuild your initrams with sudo mkinitcpio -P
  • Make sure the snapshots are added to the grub menu. There are two easy ways to do this. Only pick one of them
    • Enable the grub-btrfs.path systemd unit
    • Install snap-pac-grub from AUR

I think that is pretty much it. Of course you can also create snapper configs of other subvolumes if you like. For example /home. You just need to create a config for it in the “Snapper Settings” tab. Make sure you enable timeline settings for it as only snapshots of “root” are taken during pacman operations.

7 Likes