"mkinitcpio" needed for "snapper-support" and "btrfs-assistant"?

DenalB · January 14, 2025, 9:19pm

OK, I haven’t tested this precisely, but I think the instructions would be something like this:

yay -Syu snapper inotify-tools snap-pac grub-btrfs btrfs-assistant btrfsmaintenance (You don’t need the last two but they are convenient. I am going to use Btrfs Assistant in the instructions but it can all be done via the CLI as well)

In Btrfs Assistant, on the “Snapper Settings” tab:

Uncheck “Snapper timeline enabled” so you won’t get hourly snapshots

Check “Snapper cleanup enabled” to automatically delete older snapshots based on your retention rules

Click “New”, select / in the box and use the name “root” for the config

Set the settings to your preference although since we disabled the timeline timer, the only one that matters is the “Numbers” setting. This is the number of snapshots from pacman operations that will be retained. Keep in mind that it takes two snapshots for each so if you set this to 10 you will get 5 pacman operations.

After saving the changes, go to the snapper tab and take a manual snapshot to ensure that it works and for testing.

Run sudo systemctl enable --now grub-btrfsd

Run sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Install or remove a package using yay or pacman

Reboot and see if the snapshots are in your grub menu. You should see 3 snapshots. The manual one and the two from the pacman operation.

Go back into Btrfs Assistant and delete the manual snapshot we created earlier.

@dalto
Thanks for your guide to install snapper and btrfs assistant and to configure pre- and post-snapshots. Your guide is working fine.

When I want to include /home into snapshots, do I just have to create a config for /home and a snapshot will be created then? And how to restore snapshots for both configs then? Do I have to restore root and home one after the other?

I mount other drives into /mnt via fstab. Do I have to set an exclusion for /mnt when taking snapshots, so that files and folders from mounted drives are not restored?

Sorry for asking such questions.