Btrfs Assistant 1.0 is coming, testers needed

Btrfs Assistant doesn’t know or care what DM you are using. It is more likely that some Qt stuff is missing from your environment.

What DE or WM are you using?

I am using Fluxbox.

This is just a guess but I would speculate that you are missing some Qt environment settings. Either that or they are being set in a way that doesn’t make them available to Btrfs Assistant. It is possible that sddm is setting those because it needs them to work and they are being inherited by the fluxbox session.

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OK, thanks. I will look into it.

rpm-ostree takes care of the system snapshops, and I want to use BtrFS Assistant to back up home. for the system snapshot. Where can I find a .rpm ?

Dunno if this is useful for testing, but on a fresh clean virgin Arch install, btrfs-assistant from the AUR, with Fluxbox and LY as the display manager, the btrfs assistant launcher is not working.

It isn’t useful unless you can tell me what the error you are getting is.

What happens when you run btrfs-assistant-launcher from a terminal?

The same as in the above post.

[vlad@Arch-Stue ~]$  btrfs-assistant-launcher
qt.qpa.xcb: could not connect to display
qt.qpa.plugin: Could not load the Qt platform plugin "xcb" in "" even though it was found.
This application failed to start because no Qt platform plugin could be initialized. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

Available platform plugins are: eglfs, linuxfb, minimal, minimalegl, offscreen, vnc, xcb.

/sbin/btrfs-assistant: line 42:  6329 Aborted                 (core dumped) btrfs-assistant-bin ${params}
[vlad@Arch-Stue ~]$

It looks like there may be something not setup with your Qt environment. Some DEs set that up for you but you may have to do it yourself with fluxbox.

Either that or fluxbox needs special handling to run a Qt application as root. There are a couple of wayland environments like that but I have never seen it with X11.

OK, I will probably figure it out. Just though maybe it could be useful to know for testing. Perhaps most folks with window manager will not care for a snapper GIU, and just do it from the terminal. I use Fluxbox as a halfway step between a DE and a tiling window manager.

There are lots of people using it with Window Managers in general. Probably not many/any using fluxbox specifically though.

I will report here if and when I solve it. Should be possible.

For the time being though, I will go with sddm, as it solves another small problem so I don\t have to fine-tune every single very very small detail in my install. Gotta set a line somewhere.

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The features for version 1.8 are now available in btrfs-assistant-git if anyone wants to test them out.

The most notable changes are that it now automatically detects when something other than a nested subvolume is mounted at /.snapshots. This should make it easier for people who prefer to use a flat subvolume like @snapshots there.

The other is that you can now change or remove the cleanup algorithm for snapper snapshots. The most obvious use case for this is if you have an important snapshot that you don’t want removed, you can remove the cleanup algorithm from it.

Here is the full changelog:

  • Add support for handling snapshots of the root of the btrfs partition
  • Add the ability to autodetect the subvolume mounted at /.snapshots
  • Display the cleanup algorithm on the list of Snapper snapshots
  • Add a context menu to the Snapper page
  • Add the ability to change the cleanup algorithm of Snapper snapshots
  • Fix an issue with the default config file using the wrong format
  • Added tooltip about how timeline snapshots work to snapper config settings
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After accepting the EndeavourOS updates this morning, indicated by the notifier, I soon received another notification to update btrfs-assistant. I accepted this, and updated, I wasn’t sure which path I should take, but chose “I” for all installed options and rebuild, and the build progress looked ok. The gui application looks ok, and the console version shows 1.8.

Three questions:

  1. was my choice of “I” for installed, correct?
  2. where can I review the build log?
  3. are there any other questions that I should be asking or issues that I should be checking?

Thank you for your time, and your work on Btrfs Assistant.

That is probably coming from yay. There are a bunch of different questions that that you can get asked depending on your config. Without knowing what you were being asked it is hard to say what the right answer.

However, if btrfs-assistant was built and updated then it should be fine.

I don’t think yay records a log. The pacman log will show you want was installed but not the build itself.

If your btrfs assistant shows version 1.8 then it should be installed successfully.

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I installed fresh Eos, and btrfs with separate/home and / partitions. And latest btrfs assistant

How to check if everything is fine?

What to do for snapshots? ( I have grub)

Any other maintenance for btrfs ?

Thanks :+1:

I installed this : snap-pac, snapper, grub-btrfs and btrfs-assistant

Now snapper is visible in btrfs-assistant. I configured backup for / and /home . Did i missed something ?

I have a strange issue with btrfs-assistant and Timeshift snapshots.
My snapshots are up to date: (February 2023)
image

But in Btrfs-Assistant, when I include them, I only see old snapshots from October 2022 !!!
image

No idea where this comes from, as in TimeShift I have deleted those old snapshots since a long time ago. It seems Btrfs-Assistant is “stuck” with something… somewhere. No idea how to debug this.

If it can help, I switched from Grub to Systemd-boot following @dalto tutorial, more or less around last October… so maybe it is related, maybe not.

Should I uninstall and reinstall Btrfs-Assistant ? Something else ? Thanks for your thoughts…

You can optionally install btrfsmaintenance.

Also, if you want timeline snapshots, make sure you enable snapper-timeline.service. Either way, you should enable snapper-cleanup.service. These can be enabled via systemctl or from within Btrfs Assistant by checking the boxes and clicking on “Apply systemd changes”.

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Can you share the output of sudo btrfs sub li /