Good procedure for Auto-Timeshift before updates (on ext4)?

General system Newbie
1

I’m running EOS/Cinnamon (on a laptop, ext4 filesystem) and have set up both Timeshift and Back in Time to auto-create one daily snapshot each.

Since I’m rather new to EOS and might break something, I’d also like to automatically have a Timeshift snapshot made just before upgrades.

I’m using the Arch repos and the AUR, exclusively—no Flatpak or Snap here. AppImages are used very seldom, mostly to check new features, then delete the AppImage again.

Please check and advise if I’m on the right track here—thank you!

  • I already have periodic (daily) Timeshift & Back in Time snapshots set up. These work nicely and even catch up when the laptop isn’t used for a few days. Both currently save to the laptop’s SSD.
  • I typically update using either eos-update --aur or yay.
  • I’m considering using the timeshift-autosnap package, even though I’m not on btrfs. But it hasn’t been updated for 6 years (!), is it still good?
  • yay can call pacman multiple times (after builds) on larger updates, so I thought adding a permanent --batchinstall might be wise, to avoid multiple Timeshift snapshots on each & every update. I would use yay -Y --batchinstall --save to do that, and let yay create a ~/.config/yay/config.json for that. Any drawbacks using this method?
  • I’d then modify /etc/timeshift-autosnap.conf to set my parameters (i.e., number of snapshots to retain).
  • Using the Pacman pre-install hook, either of eos-update, yay or pacman should then initiate one pre-update automatic Timeshift (which might take a while, not being on btrfs). Right?
  • Since I don’t see automated background Timeshift or Back in Time tasks happening: What will happen if I accidentally start an update while Timeshift or Back in Time are actually running? Horrible crashes, or a graceful wait for updates until the background process has finished? Any experiences here?

Thanks in advance for any valuable insights!

2

I use auto snap and it uses Rsync on ext4. Not a single issue.
I setup the timeshift backup volume on another SSD to pipeline the read/write IOs for almost 2x performance

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