I remember seeing timeshift shipped with Linux Mint, and it reminded me a lot of Time Machine on my Mac. Can this be installed and is it fully functional on EndeavourOS? If not, what is? I want to be able to save snapshots of my OS, but I also don’t want to use a software that’s not entirely compatible or if I likely run into stability issues with it.
Timeshift works fine on EOS. Many people use it.
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Works fine on my end! Installed EOS and timeshift in the noobest way possible and have encountered no problems by far
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When I was using it, it worked as expected
Does it only backup system files, or will it behave like a ‘time machine’ by taking a full image of your disk? I want to back up everything and restore it all in one shot.
It’s up to how you set it up, in general there are easier ways to make complete 100% clones of your drive if that’s what you’re trying to do.
You mean things like Clonezilla?
I am essentially seeking to replicate macOS’s ‘time machine’ functionality.
No idea what that is but if it’s the same as ‘time machine’ for macOS then maybe I should check it out.
Timeshift doesn’t take a full image. It copies the files needed to restore your system. It’s primary use case if for situations where something breaks in your system and you want to restore it. By default it excludes all user data.
What it does in practice depends on how your partitions are laid out.
I’m using timeshift on a BTRFS root file system, and I imagine it works like your mac equivalent. I can instantly go back to any snapshot I kept, and I have a rolling history where 2 weekly snapshots are kept, 5 daily snapshots are kept, and I create snapshots before updating my system (using timeshift-autosnap), so I can go back to before every system update.
It just takes a little extra space for the old snapshots.
Or even just dd, but yes.
Which one do you suggest for user data ? atm i am using btrfs-assistant
Timeshift works differently for btrfs filesystems and other filesystems. For other filesystems, it is actually using rsync to make a copy of the data.
Btrfs Assistant is purely for btrfs so they aren’t fully comparable.
Snapper/Btrfs Assistant don’t intertwine your snapshots of different subvolumes the same way Timeshift does so it is fine to them for user data.
It honestly ins’t a huge problem to use Timeshift for user data as long as you are really careful. I don’t usually recommend it though because often people make bad decisions when their system is broken and risk overwriting user data.
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When you say “by default” … are you saying it can be configured to snapshot a full image if I wanted it to?
It doesn’t really take “images”. It creates copies of a files related to a point in time it calls a “snapshot”.