Fault Tolerance
Hello all and thank you for the assistance in advance!
As humans, we tend to stick with what we are familiar with.
As a Windows user jumping ship to Linux, I have AOMEI as a backup/restore system that allows me to restore on the same drive if something corrupts, I make a mistake, what have you. Likewise, I even have the ability to restore my image to a new drive.
I saw Timeshit as an easy way to manage btrfs snapshots and sub volumes, along with Clonezilla (Clonezilla lists btrfs as supported on their website) to do entire system backups (from a Windows perspective this includes all folders on the drive, including Downloads, Users, Etc)
I know Bazzite uses btrfs and to use btrfs features without any tools require all CLI commands, which is very cumbersome and unintuitive to execute.
I also saw that Bazzite doesn’t support Timeshift or snapper.
Here are my actual questions:
1. Other than rolling back and using Pika Backup for home directory, is it possible to use Clonezilla to make system backups if I need to move it to a new drive?
2. How would I go about booting from a snapshot, like you can using Timeshift? It seems the GUI with Timeshift is very intuitive and user friendly.
26 Replies
something like timeshift is not required, you only need to backup your home drive the rest is already managed through ostree
if you want to "snapshot" your os you can use ostree pin
Is “ostree pin” the command?
Could I get the command to do the pin action?
Do you know if Clonezilla would work in taking system back ups so if an actual hard drive failure where to happen I could restore from an external drive to a new drive that I replace?
Ah I found it.
sudo ostree admin pin 0clonezilla would work, but you realistically only need to backup your home folder
Clonezilla would work because it backs up everything as an image of the entire drive
Thank you so much, @asen23 !
Last question, if you accidentally uninstall a program and all the configurations get blown away with it, I could restore the home folder and it would recover it?
usually uninstalling program doesnt remove config
I’m sorry for the dumb questions, Linux is very alien to me at the moment.
depend on the program tho
the package manager (flatpak or ostree or distrobox stuff) do not have knowledge of your config files
np, i was windows user too not long ago
your configs will remain in place, for better or worse
Oh!
Is the command
sudo ostree admin pin 0 a manual process or is there something available to make snapshots an automated thing, in case I blow something up unintentionally?
I promise that’s my last question. lol.ostree will always keep minimum 2 deployment, your current one and the one before that
it will create snapshot everytime you install or update through rpm-ostree
Oh beautiful!
so in case your current deployment wont boot, you can still boot the previous one
ostree is also only for your underlying OS and layered packages. you really shouldn't need to pin all that often unless you are specifically doing something that carries a higher than normal risk of breaking something
and if you're doing something that often that would necessitate pinning the ostree deployment, reconsider what you are doing
I appreciate it!
ostree does not manage user data
i do recommend to pin one working deployment tho, just for extra precaution
And to pin one is the sudo pin admin 0 command? If I need to select a deployment, how would I select the working one? Is that just from the grub menu?
you can select through grub
Wonderful!!
you also can do
rpm-ostree rollback to go from 0 to 1 and mark the old one as defaultYou guys are awesome! Thank you so much!!
all of this are available in the docs btw https://docs.bazzite.gg/
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