Guide to install Snapper with BTRFS Assistant and Snapper Tools

General system EndeavourOS installation
1

To install Snapper for easy rollback, you need install these packages.

After clean installation of EndevourOS, open up terminal and execute these command one by one.

sudo pacman -Syu

yay -S btrfs-assistant
yay -S grub-btrfs
yay -S snap-pac-git
yay -S snapper
yay -S snapper-tools
yay -S snapper-support

If for some reason you fail to install snapper-tools, install snapper-tools-git instead.

After all the installation, execute these commands.

sudo snapper -c root create-config /
echo "first manual snapshot"
snapper -c root create --description "initial snapshot"
sudo chmod a+rx /.snapshots
sudo chown :users /.snapshots

Now you can see BTRFS Assistant and Snapper Tools apps are installed in your system. Also, now you can see while installing packages, there will be a Pre and Post snapshot. Also, you can revert to any previous snapshot from your GRUB menu.

1 Like
2

Welcome to the forum! Thanks for the contribution.

That being said, although I don’t have time to go into details right now, I would not recommending installing these tools with these instructions, personally.

6 Likes
3

Why tho?

1 Like
4

Primarily because it is more of guide to suit your personal preferences than it is a general purpose guide for other people.

There are also some style and practical issues. For example:

This whole thing could be rewritten as:

yay -Syu btrfs-assistant snap-pac-git snapper-tools snapper-support

It would be faster to install that way as well.

I don’t recommend using *-git packages unless absolutely needed because you are essentially testing development code in that case. For most people snap-pac is in the repos and will work for most people.

For most use cases, it should be sufficient to install either snapper-tools or btrfs-assistant since they have a tremendous amount of overlap.

I personally think it is better to set this up yourself instead of installing snapper-support. I don’t see much value in installing the custom path unit anymore and since we use dracut all the mkinitcpio stuff in there has no benefit

This is done already by snapper-support. Trying to do it again will just throw an error

Why would you do this as a manual command?

This snapshot will never be removed by snapper’s cleanup service so it will stay around forever unless you manually remove it later. In most cases, you don’t want that as it will consume increasingly more disk space as time passes.

Again, this may be your personal preference but removing the security on the snapshots subvolume isn’t something that should be part of the general advice for other people.

To be clear, I am not criticizing your process. I just think there is a difference between what should be in a “guide” vs how you personally choose to setup your system.

5 Likes
5

Just in case, here’s mine: https://www.lorenzobettini.it/2023/03/snapper-and-grub-btrfs-in-arch-linux/

As suggested by dalto, it’s easier to install these tools :wink:

3 Likes
6

Thank you Sinseir6, Dalto, and lorebett!

All three of you were helpful toward my learning. Endeavour is still a bit new to me but I am reading the forum and learning daily. I don’t look to being spoon-fed and I always want to know “the why” to every exercise so whenever I face new tasks, I know how best to perform them and understand them as fully as possible. Thanks guys!

3 Likes
7

This is the beauty of Linux community. Linux problems have multiple ways to fix.

1 Like