Using existing snapper snapshots on drives without a config

FAQ and Tutorials
1

A while ago I had to reinstall my system due to heavy filesystem corruption. When I started to reinstall all my software and restore all my configurations I faced an issue with my snapper configuration.

Snapper would refuse to create a new config for my previous @home subvolume (that luckily did not suffer from any corruption), because the .snapper directory already existed.

This is what I did to get it working in the end:

  1. Take /etc/snapper/config-templates/garuda and copy it to /etc/snapper/configs and rename it to something that makes sense, like in my case home
  2. Edit the config to point at the correct subvolume (/ by default)
  3. Add the filename of your config to SNAPPER_CONFIGS in /etc/conf.d/snapper. This is how it looks with both of my subvolumes: SNAPPER_CONFIGS="root home"

If you forget the last step, snapper will just delete the config that you created. Any further configuration can now be done from within the btrfs-assistant.

Hope this helps!

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