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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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timeshift with btrfs: am I doing it right? (lemmy.kde.social)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hello! I just set up timeshift on my EndeavourOS pc, but this time I chose BTRFS instead of rsync. I currently decided to store the snapshot on the same hard drive of my installation because, well, it's my only one. during the setup, it only asked me if I wanted to include the @home or not. using rsync, instead, it asked for a bunch of locations, and I could choose to include only dotfile, everything, nothing,... is this normal?
also, the snapshot took like... 1 second? with rsync it may take up to 5 minutes... is this normal? or am I backupping fried air?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Depends on how much you change per time unit.

I take full system backups every three hours, but the backups are thinned so that there are previous 24 hourly ones, previous n daily ones, previous m monthly ones, etc. Similar approach can be used with snapshots.

I don't currently use snapshots—I don't run btrfs anymore—but when I did, I did a snapshot every hour and kept them for 24 hours. But then I backed up the latest snapshot, which gives consistent backups, versus regular backups where files can change while you're doing them. I'm nowadays using bcachefs, but I don't quite trust its snapshots yet so I haven't started using them ;).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm nowadays using bcachefs...

Haven't heard of this FS, so I checked the specs... was actually hoping to see a working RAID5/6 feature, but as it stands now it only supports RAID1/0/10. Too bad, would've considered it as a viable option to mdadm + BTRFS.

It said the code base was build on something stable, but it didn't say what, do you happen to know what FS this project is a fork of?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Too bad, would’ve considered it as a viable option to mdadm + BTRFS.

Currently I'm using bcachefs with LVM (which can do raid, but I currently only have one NVME SSD), though it indeed does have RAID1/0/10 support. But overall I expect it not to not make the same silly default choices as btrfs, such as not being able to start the system if a RAID1 component of your root filesystem is missing. And, supposedly, when the RAID5/6 becomes stable, it won't have the write hole problem.

It said the code base was build on something stable, but it didn’t say what, do you happen to know what FS this project is a fork of?

It's based on bcache :) by the same author, but of course bcache is not really a file system but rather some kind of object storage layer for the purpose of caching slower block devices and absorbing write load.

Bcachefs might be coming soon to the mainline kernel, so that's going to make it a lot easier to try out. Personally however I have lost one bcachefs (that FS was readable, though, and I have good backups), but I have also lost a btrfs before and seen reiserfs bugs, so I don't too heavily count it against it; overall I enjoy its stability when using basic functionality. I haven't dared trying snapshots with it yet..