I just ran into a weird issue where Timeshift would fill an entire SSD with a single Timeshift snapshot. Took me a few minutes but I realised that you need to manually exclude the mounted SSD used to store Timeshift snapshots, otherwise Timeshift will get stuck in some weird recursive loop of backing up backups. This is mentioned nowhere and there’s no option in the otherwise friendly GUI to exclude the backup location from backups. Just leaving this here in case anyone else runs into a similar issue and searches about it. After doing this - Timeshift backup was nice and fast and…not hundreds of GB. Sorted.
I don’t use timeshift so i don’t know too much about it. I am using btrfs file system with btrfs-assistant and snapper-support along with btrfsmaintenance and grub-btrfs. It seems to work quite well for taking snapshots and reverting.
Yes I love that feature in Opensuse. I tried to set up fedora to use btrfs assistant (snapper) but it’s too complicated for me. I simply do not get it. I find timeshift very easy and timeshift works with btrfs in fedora if you change the file structure to @home and @. I’m not a total beginner but some things like that I just don’t get tbh lol.
So you use timeshift for snapshots of/on a btrfs-volume in btrfs-mode? Where was the second SSD mounted at?
Just to understand what happened here?
If it was creating recursion it would have to be in rsync mode. That shouldn’t be possible with a btrfs snapshot.
That’s why I’m asking. Btrfs doesn’t cross snapshots borders, and from quick glance at the Timeshift source it seems that it excludes the usual mount points. That’s why I was curious.
I was talking about ext4 in my post. I mentioned btrfs only in reply to someone else. The loop was caused by rsync timeshift backing up it’s own backup drive in /var/mnt/thessd
Oh, that makes sense. There is no setting for the backup position though, changing it isn’t supported:
You can save the backups to any drive. It even recommends using a non system drive and it backs up and restores from /var/mnt fine. I think it means you have to have the snapshots in the /timeshift folder?
I’m confused, it warns that only the /timeshift directory on the same device is supported and it doesn’t offers any setting to change that location either?
Maybe we are talking about a different application, it’s the timeshift package, right?
I just checked and it says “snapshots are saved to /timeshift on the selected partition, other locations are not supported” so you can save snapshots to any other drive anywhere you want including a USB pen drive but they have to be in a /timeshift folder. Funnily enough I added a 3rd drive today and forgot to exclude it from the backups and low and behold timeshift got stuck in a loop trying to do some weird crap until I manually exuded /mnt/3rdssd
Anyway I am not very good at explaining things mate so don’t worry if this does not make much sense lol 