Where are my /home Snapper snapshots?

limotux · August 10, 2022, 9:02am

I am on BTRFS, KDE Plasma.
I just installed (late last night) Snapper, BTRFS Assistant,… etc.
From OpenSUSE website I did

sudo snapper -c home create-config /home

As far as I understand it is already snapshotting the system every hour, and I believe it made a/some snapshot(s) to my /home.

Previously when I used TimeShift I could use Dolphin to browse to the snapshots of my /home, copy/paste whatever file I need from an earlier snapshot.

I have been trying to read/find where are the snapshots of my /home?
Any help highly appreciated.

sradjoker · August 10, 2022, 9:07am

/home/.snapshots

limotux · August 10, 2022, 9:11am

Thank @sradjoker
Got “Could not enter folder…”
Even in Dolphin at /home, ticked “show hidden folders” it is not there!
Anything to be ticked in the image below?

sradjoker · August 10, 2022, 9:14am

Then I don’t think snapshots are occurring.

limotux · August 10, 2022, 9:19am

So, how to enable snapshotting /home?
I could see I have @home and @home/.snapshots in “subvolumes” tab!

sradjoker · August 10, 2022, 9:20am

can you click on the checkbox at the bottom and repost your screenshot on

limotux · August 10, 2022, 9:45am

Sure!

And to give you a full picture.

sradjoker · August 10, 2022, 9:48am

It seems snapshots are there.
Can you run this in the terminal

cd /home
ls -al

limotux · August 10, 2022, 9:59am

This is what I thought. But been trying for hours to find it!

[limo@lenovo ~]$ cd /home
[limo@lenovo home]$ ls -al
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root  28 Aug  1 18:53 .
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 142 Aug  1 18:46 ..
drwx------ 1 limo limo 548 Aug 10 11:49 limo
drwxr-x--- 1 root root   8 Aug 10 11:33 .snapshots
[limo@lenovo home]$

sradjoker · August 10, 2022, 10:00am

Congratulations you found them

limotux · August 10, 2022, 10:03am

Is this where they should be? Is it system snapshots, /home or both?
Anyway the folder is locked!

sradjoker · August 10, 2022, 10:06am

Yes, these are home snapshots. System snapshots are under

/.snapshots

Yes, these are read only snapshots taken by root (super user). Of course you can’t access them. As shown in ls -al you can see the owner.

limotux · August 10, 2022, 10:16am

So, I remember @dalto like warned me of puting /home snapshots under root… but I just followed defaults!

So, where you think I can change /home snapshot? Putting it in /home will creat sort of “circular” snapshotting and waste a lot of space? Previous snaptshots will be snapshotted with /home snapshot? Right?

My goal is to access any of the previous /home snapshots and copy/paste any file I need to /home.

If I changed somehow to put it under /root or “/”, wont this be “circular” snapshotting when it snapshots the system?

Sorry, I am absolutely new to Snapper! (18 hrs only and about half of them sleeping)

UPDATE:
Playing with BTRFS Assistant I created a new file “2022-08-10 12:35:43 PM EET.txt”
Restored latest /home snapshot from BTRFS Assitant, rebooted as per message shown.
I have tho old /home, the new .txt file is not there.
Well this is somehow good.

Still I prefer to find a way to browse old /home snapshots and copy/paste a file to my /home (What If I accidentally deleted important.pdf, emptied recycle bin, but still want to recover important.pdf without deleting the files created after it was deleted!)

Hopefully @dalto can help with that in BTRFS Assistant. (add an option to browse/recover a single file or a folder or groups of!)

dalto · August 10, 2022, 11:24am

By default, the folder is not world readable. This is deliberate. However, you can browse and restore files through Btrfs Assistant directly.

You shouldn’t change it. It is working as snapper is designed to work.

No. That isn’t how snapshots work. You take a snapshot of a subvolume not a directory tree. In other words when you snapshot @home, it doesn’t take a snapshot of everything under /home, it takes a snapshot of the subvolume mounted at /home.

Since snapshots are subvolumes themselves, they won’t be included in the snapshot.

OK. They are all still there.

Have you tried clicking the browse button in Btrfs Assistant in the snapper tabs?

Technically speaking, it is possible to change the permissions of /home/.snapshots so you can browse it from dolphin freely. However, if you do that, you need to be careful with things like your indexer. If you do that, and you are indexing all of /home, your files will be indexed more than once. Keeping it locked away from your normal user account ensures that can’t happen accidentally.

limotux · August 10, 2022, 11:49am

I now understand it more.

Wonderful, I just did it, edited x.txt, restored this file in particular, what I edited is not there.
Deleted x.txt then restored from a snapshot.
This is exactly what I wanted to do.

Sure, this is much better of course!

Now, I confidently say, I am OK with BTRFS Assistant.
In my point of view, Snapper + BTRFS Assistant is much better than TimeShift after trying both (TimeShift for 9 days and BTRFS Assistant + Snapper for 9 hours)

Now all my dreams came true.

I have BTRFS and snapshotting system and data.
I can esily restore files/folders from a previous snapshot (the greatest feature in my humble opinion)
I have Recoll working more than perfect in Dolphin (as at Make Dolphin Use Recoll "kio_recoll" Installed - #72 by limotux - I am putting a link hopefully to help someone struggling with BTRFS and Baloo - my humble opinion and simple understanding computers by concept are made “initially” to store and retrieve data (plus other things of course) , and this data should be easily searchable)

You know what guys… life is beautiful… it is you who made it this way.