Timeshift problem - "Booted into snapshot" everytime I startup the PC

General system Applications
1

So I had to boot into a snapshot recently because I faced some weird problems and didn’t have time to find a fix.
I restored the snapshot, faced a problem where it would keep booting into the same image of that snapshot every time, thus not saving anything.
I fixed it by going into Live environment and removing the “@” directory, and putting the “@” from that snapshot in place of it.
Everything works and is saved normally, but I keep getting the “booted into snapshot” notification every time I boot and I am really annoyed by it.
Has anyone faced a similar issue? How do I fix it?

2

How did you do this specifically?

When you boot into your system normally, what does findmnt / show?

3

So specifically, I booted into live EOS environment, opened the BTRS ssd where my root normally is, and deleted the “@” subvolume folder. After that I went into “timeshift-snapshots”, found the exact snapshot that I wanted to restore to, opened it and copied the “@” subvolume and pasted it in place of the old one that I have previously removed.
I did that because I found some post online about a similar problem and that’s what the guy said he did to get it working.

findmnt /
shows

TARGET SOURCE                                                           FSTYPE OPTIONS
/      /dev/nvme0n1p2[/timeshift-btrfs/snapshots/2022-10-27_17-16-41/@] btrfs  rw,noatime,compress=zstd

and I now see the problem, though I have no idea how to fix it.

4

It seems you ignored Timeshift’s warning “please restore the snapshot” after booting into the writable snapshot and continued modifying the snapshot, but it incorrectly overwrote Grub boot config when updating grub, that is why it always boots into the snapshot.

How to fix Grub boot config in your current writable snapshot.

  1. Mount btrfs root system.
$ su
# mount -t btrfs -o subvol=/ /dev/{YOUR_BTRFS_ROOT_PARTITION} /mnt
# cd /mnt

  1. Edit Grub config timeshift-btrfs/snapshots/2022-10-27_17-16-41/@/boot/grub/grub.cfg
    Carefully remove all the same part of some lines: timeshift-btrfs/snapshots/2022-10-27_17-16-41/
    Then save it.

  2. Restore your current snapshot back to normal system.

# cd /mnt
# mv @ @broken
# btrfs subvolume snapshot timeshift-btrfs/snapshots/2022-10-27_17-16-41/@ @

  1. Reboot into the normal system.

  2. Then run to update grub which correctly overwrites the grub boot config in the normal system.

  3. You can delete the broken subvolume @broken or not

  4. Done.

5

That means you ran grub-mkconfig while booted into a snapshot.

See @Zesko’s post for one possible solution.