Replacement for Timeshift

General system
1

Hi there,

I was searching for a replacment for timeshift and timeshift-autosnap and started to work with borg and borgmatic. The latter one is basically a cli frontend to borg which simplifies the backup and pruning process. Further information can be found here for borgmatic and here for borg itself.

In addition to an easy config which currently only backups /etc on a daily basis I created a hook 01-borgmatic.hook in /usr/share/libalpm/hooks in order to run a backup before an update like timeshift-autosnap does:

[Trigger]
Operation = Upgrade
Type = Package
Target = *

[Action]
Description = Creating borgmatic update before upgrade...
Depends = timeshift
When = PreTransaction
Exec = /usr/bin/borgmatic 
AbortOnFail

In addition, both packages are in the arch repos, so there is no need for any aur packages right now.

This is currently a little bit work in progress, so maybe I can come up with some more details in the near future.

Christoph

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2

Does it use btrfs snapshots?

3

Hmm…I am not quite sure, but as far as I understood this borg relies on a repository where the files are being backed up, so I guess this is not an btrfs snapshot.

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4

Borg is independent from the actual filesystem, so no snapshots. But it is great a compressing and deduping. I use it for all my backups despite the fact that I run btrfs everywhere.

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