SNAPSHOTS SAVED MY LIFE (LINUX) , TIMESHIFT

When I started using Linux, I messed up a lot.
One wrong thing and boom system not booting
No reset button. I was scared to try anything new.
Then I found Timeshift.
It felt like magic.
Take backup. Break system. Restore. Done.
I used rsync first it saved more stuff.
Later tried btrfs more smart, fast, and saves just system stuff.
I broke my system many times. Timeshift saved me every time.
Now I don’t use Timeshift.
I use OpenSUSE these days, and it has btrfs snapshot built-in.
It takes auto backups when I install or change system stuff.
If I mess up, I just go back.
No extra setup. It's smooth.
Just wanted to share this.
This gave me confidence to explore Linux more.
I break things and fix them.

Comments

[Michael]

Couldn't be in more agreement with you.
Now I have Debian 13 with btrfs partitions, grub-btrfs and inotify-tools to watch the snapshot directory. And yes, Timeshift is helpful as a GUI, and can do rsync and btrfs if Timeshift can find a @ partition. Suppose you boot up and it just crashes.
How do you access your Timeshift snapshots to restore them?
You could boot into a live ISO, but it is better to have your rollback snapshots on the grub menu. Here is my partitioning.

[Sourav Mahato]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts! 🙏 As a new Linux user, I find it really exciting to explore. Debian has been one of the most stable and reliable distros I’ve tried. From what I’ve seen, Timeshift with rsync doesn’t support direct boot recovery I think it requires a live boot. But with Btrfs, we can restore snapshots directly from the GRUB menu. I’ve used openSUSE, and it uses Snapper for direct snapshots, which can also be accessed from GRUB. I don’t think there’s a direct way after a crash, but if the terminal still works, we can use Timeshift through the CLI. What you did is definitely one of the best possible ways to recover....

[Michael]

I do appreciate the comments. If you are interested, I have written up a detailed tutorial on how to set up Debian from scratch with Btrfs, subvolumes, snapshot, grub-btrfs, and inotify-tools to watch the ~/.snapshots directory for activity, so the new snapshots are written to the grub menu. That way, you can always restore as long as you can access the grub menu snapshots list. You can still install snapper to learn how it does the same thing at the CLI. And yes, to confirm rsync cannot create bootable snapshots, this is a feature built into btrfs.

[Sourav Mahato]

Thanks for giving your effort you can send me link i will definitely checkout.....