Hey guys, so I got my system setup with BTRFS via the installer but I have no idea how to enable the snapshots feature. On my laptop, I have the drive encrypted (and it’s all on one drive, which is an ssd) but on my desktop it’s not encrypted but the root folder and swapfile lives on a ssd while the home folder lives on a hdd. Both systems use swapfiles and they both have BTRFS. How do I go about setting up snapshots/rollback on both systems?
Snapshots are automatically enabled; they are a core part of BTRFS. For snapshot management, I use snapper. If you want a simpler tool, one with a GUI, try timeshift.
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Does snapper work with rsync clients? I backup my system to an offsite server that’s on the network. From what I could find, timeshift doesn’t work with rsync at all
Timeshift works great with rsync; check out the Linux Mint forums and you’ll find tons of posts about it. Snapper, however, does not.
Now, if you’re talking about using rsync to backup your snapshots to another location, then neither option I gave you will do that. There are BTRFS backup scripts on GitHub that will do this, but I haven’t used them.
Ah ok, yeah it doesn’t seem to support backing up to a remote location.
Also, I just added in the resume parameters for hibernate but whenever I hibernate it does shut the machine off and all, but when I turn it back on it makes an entirely new session instead of restoring the old one. Any idea as to why it’s doing that?
I don’t use hibernation. I would suggest splitting your question into (2) posts as they are unrelated.
Hey do I need particular packages for BTRFS snapshots? I saw on the main guide saying you need packages like grub-btrfs in order for it to work at all. Neither of my systems have this
grub-btrfs is only used for creating GRUB entries for snapshots, not creating or managing the snapshots themselves.
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Ah ok! What would I be missing if I didn’t have the package installed?
The ability to select a snapshot to boot into via the GRUB menu - that’s it.
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Sorry for the late reply! I’ve been busy with school. I did get a chance to looking around for btrfs scripts and I came across this: https://github.com/digint/btrbk
It seems to aim to do what I would like to do, but I haven’t actually gotten a chance to fully try it (yet).
That’s for using snapper, which from what I found doesn’t support remote snapshots.
snap-sync supports backup to external drive or remote machine.
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