Snapshot restore not working (snapper & timeshift)

Issues & Assistance Unsupported Software (AUR & Other)
19

I think this is true. It appears you have made several other configuration decisions which have broken your install, completely independently from your effort to get Booster working.

I still don’t know if booting off of Btrfs snapshots with Booster is even possible since it hasn’t been established if it supports using the overlayfs or not, but regardless I would agree that the current state of your install is definitely not “Booster’s fault.”

I just installed this ISO on my laptop to test. Here is what I did:

  1. Completed the installation;
  2. Brought the system fully up to date;
  3. Uninstalled Mousepad (the text editor);
  4. Rebooted into the pre-pacman -R mousepad Btrfs snapshot;
  5. Restored the snapshot;
  6. Rebooted into the normal system.

Mousepad is back, everything works, no issues of any kind.

Here are a few considerations:

Snapper and Timeshift have their own snapshot management systems. They might not be “aware” of each other’s snapshots, or could be causing conflicts with each other in other ways. I would just stick with one tool, and get rid of the other one altogether.

In this thread it seems like you are trying to use Snapper snapshots, so I would say just stick with that and don’t install Timeshift at all.

Grub Customizer makes permanent changes that cannot be reverted simply by uninstalling it. They do add a file at /etc/grub.d/backup/RESTORE_INSTRUCTIONS to help guide you when you are removing it, however if you don’t know to look there then it is obviously not helpful.

You can manually remove it, but there are a few steps involved; see this post for example: Cleaning Grub - #3 by BluishHumility

If you re-installed and added Grub Customizer again, I would not expect booting snapshots to work.

grub-btrfs does not restore snapshots, it is only for booting into snapshots. If you make a bunch of unbootable snapshots, it makes sense that you can restore them without issue but you cannot boot into them.

It is uncommon to use this service. Probably it is not related to your issue, but this is not the service you should be examining for troubleshooting the problem in this thread.

This kernel is not an appropriate choice for your system. See here:

❯ pacman -Ss nitrous
chaotic-aur/linux-nitrous 6.8.4-1
    Modified Linux kernel optimized for Skylake X and newer, compiled using clang

You do not have the hardware this kernel is designed to be run on:

Unless you have a compelling reason for using this kernel anyway, I would switch to something which is optimized for the hardware you are using. Or even just stay on the LTS kernel.

I have heard this as well, although in your case I would expect Booster must be near instantaneous because it isn’t actually doing anything:

This thread started off with snapshots not working, but then it turns out the init system had been changed and that is broken too, and Grub Customizer was set up and a bunch of stuff in /etc/grub.d was broken, and new kernels were installed but they weren’t getting images created to go with them, and so on and so on.

In general, it seems like you are making a lot of major system changes at the same time. When things are broken on the other end of that, it’s hard to figure out what went wrong because you already changed so much stuff. Try to take it easy, maybe make one big change at a time and do some testing to make sure everything is working well before changing a bunch of other stuff.

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