You might have noticed that there has been some action going on regarding integrating Snapper better in our Garuda Assistant. Our next release will ship Snapper instead of Timeshift as tool to handle our snapshots
Why Snapper instead of Timeshift? @dalto did a great job at outlining advantages in the dedicated Garuda Assistant testing threads. To give a quick overview:
snapper supports taking snapshots of any mounted subvolume, not only @ or @home.
snapper allows you to name your snapshots however you like
snapper supports both flat and nested subvolume layouts
snapper creates read-only snapshots
tools have been created for snapper which allow snapshot replication to external hosts/devices to allow snapshots to be used as part of a backup strategy
snapper doesn't require the root of the btrfs partition to be mounted
Apart from that, integration with GRUB and the system itself stays mostly the same. The great thing about this is that we get a native way of handling snapshots in our Garuda Assistant!
While it is certainly possible to convert a system using Timeshift to Snapper (installing snapper-support should be enough at this point - this will setup the needed configs and remove Timeshift), we will ship Snapper out of the box soon and need some people to test our new isos. Some testing has already been done by team members (eg. I'm running a fresh installation using the test iso) but we feel that we need some more feedback before releasing a major change like this.
A fitting dr460nized iso is available here: https://iso.builds.garudalinux.org/iso/garuda/dr460nized/210916/
At this point also a big thanks to @dalto for taking care of integrating Snapper with our Garuda Assistant app!
Installed, configured, etc. Then rebooted into a Snapper snapshot (had one spurious error msg), updated and created new snapshot via Garuda Assistant, then rebooted into normal system.
All went well. Everyone--especially @dalto --has worked hard on the new assistant. This is a keeper.
When you boot into a snapshot you will get some minor errors because the snapshots are now read-only.
It is actually possible to work around those but I think it is probably better not to by default. In most cases, when you boot into a snapshot, you shouldn’t be using the system. You should just restore the snapshot and reboot.
This is really cool! One of the reasons why I would always personally use Timeshift on other distributions instead of Snapper was because there haven't been any good GUI tools for it, but yours seems really complete.
I do have to ask, though, I've always been confused on how to restore snapshots with Snapper via the CLI and while not having booted into a snapshot like how Timeshift does it. Is there a way you can do that?
Snapper doesn’t handle restores at all because suse handles this using the default subvolume and their specific layout. If you want to restore a snapshot you can either use Garuda Assistant GUI or do it manually via the CLI. It isn’t that hard to do it manually but it isn’t a single command like timeshift.
i wanted to try to test this as a newbie, since i have little clue as to what i am doing at all, but i was able to install the iso in a vm, i did nothing to configure snapper... and was still able to boot into a saved image,,, just had one error.
this was when everything was booting back up, but i still was able to boot to the image i wanted, personally the only thing i had a hard time with was when i was trying to select a image, i could not tell which one i was looking at since i did not rename it, they all looked like the same default name, i am sure i could have made it to show the time and date first, but this was just straight out of the box..
all in all, it was still simple to use, and did what it was supposed to do for me.
great! then i was able to run this with out any issues, is it possible to have a default name generate as the date and time? i think it might be easier to know which snapshot your looking at in the grub list. for me that was the only hard part, figuring out which was which because they looked exactly the same in the menu ... if you need i could try it again and get a screenshot of how it looks on my end.
This is an exciting development, as Timeshift has been giving me headaches ever since I started storing them on my PC's SSD as opposed to the system NVMe (hopefully it'll be of little consequence soon but the program always thought I was booting into an existing snapshot when I wasn't. I could never figure that one out)
Thanks team! I'll try to do some testing and report back with any findings.
