It seems that the solution in your case was to boot up a Live ISO, install btrfs-assistant, mount your btrfs partition and restore from btrfs-assistant.
Sounds simple enough to me. I’ve never tried it though.
I didn’t think that btrfs assistant was that powerful and had a more diverse use-case.
Yes for sure that would be a solution! I’ll try that on a test machine!
Unless you use timeshift. In this case you should install and use timeshift instead of btrfs-assistant. 
Why would you ever do that? 
On a personal note, I ditched timeshift as soon as I saw your post on Btrfs assistant in the forum. I didn’t like timeshift at all and was looking for a better solution. Also, I have the git version so I get to test the latest features always.
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Why? Aren’t the ones generated by timeshift restorable by btrfs-assistant?
In theory, yes. In practice, Btrfs Assistant doesn’t have support for that. It only has code to restore Snapper snapshots and it’s own backups.
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Ok, thanks! Good to know! I’ll try with timeshift then
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I agree with you. I tried it for a couple days and it was perfect.
The only drawback it does not support booting to snapshots.
I hope developers use this and add snapshot booting to systemd-boot.
Another +1 for SD-boot
Its simple and in my case I have as close to a fully signed/verified boot as Linux can get with it (bootloader, kernel, initramfs,etc. Signed)
Unless you’re dead set against systemd, use something that currently cant work with it, or aren’t on uefi its a quick, clean, and simple alternative
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I find it hilarious that Arch has decided that the issue is “not a bug” because “Arch users shouldn’t be hitting this issue, if at all”: https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/75701#comment210566
If you look at /r/archlinux there are countless people troubleshooting broken systems. Are all of them using “derivative” distros?
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