System Recovery with Timeshift and Snapshots

If you are using the btrfs file system and Timeshift, you can easily recover your system from the snapshots you have, and not necessarily only from the GUI. In this video, I am going to show you how to recover your system from the console, when your system doesn't boot up correctly.
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[@arkadiuszdzik3452]

To the point and a very clear and easy presentation. Thank you.

[@peterjansen4826]

Very true.

[@duser]

I am so glad you're doing well! Take care and thank you for these amazing videos

[@ronnierush9379]

Great video> You can also boot from any flash drive with any live OS that has Timeshift installed on it and use the full Gui, its very easy as long as you were running Timeshift and have the snapshots points on the system you wish to repair. It can save a LOT of hassle :-)

[@SA77888]

Dunno why, despite ussing Timeshift........making frequent/automatic snapshots..........I didnt have confidence in it to actually restore my system should I need it. Well.......being a noob I just messed my settings up and choose to use Timeshift to put things back to how they were.......and it worked perfectly........and was very easy to use too. Impressed with how easy it is to use.

[@Chris.Wiley.]

Thank you Ermanno; this is super helpful information.

[@nemogamma578]

Thank You, great utility. What about snapper ? Which differences ? It seams snapper snapshots takes less Mb on the drive.

[@PoeLemic]

Loved this video. Thanks for showing us how to do this so easily.

[@pantasio]

thank you sir. I waiting for your next video: How to system Recovery with Timeshift to another bigger HDD.

[@ryanlanglois1123]

I've been looking for a solution for this for 2 days. Wouldn't you know it!!! Thank you sir for your videos.

[@gerds.9956]

Very helpfull👍🏻👍🏻 Thank you Ermanno!

[@Steven_nevetS]

Excellent video! Learned something!!

[@wotw86]

If you're using grub, you could install grub-btrfs package and have snapshots availble directly from grub menu to boot in that particular snapshot.

[@Bob-1802]

Late comment: I just noticed, while testing few distros, that the new Debian-based distro SpiralLinux (from the same creator of GeckoLinux) will install your suggested setup automatically from its Calameres installer. Snapshots are pre-scheduled, nice for new users, and are available at boot time from grub menu.

[@Appalling68]

Excellent. Just a freakin excellent video.

[@Mikesco3]

One thing I also do is to do an rsync timeshift backup to an external device, as a second form of backup, this is a really helpful redundant backup feature and it helps for cases where if the main ssd dies or becomes corrupt or if you need to migrate the system to another computer.

[@techfan7808]

Thank you for the video. Very Useful. Any chance you might do troubleshooting Boot with GRUB2 and separately SystemD-Boot?

[@ps-ri2qk]

Great video and good general information. What I would've stressed was the fact that timeshift btrfs snapshot restores do not work - unless you have the "exact" lvm subvolume mount naming sequence you have in /etc/fstab. You're forced to use @ and @home layout for it to function correctly. Super tedious and frustrating to figure out the hard way. Not sure exactly what the original developer was thinking when he designed it. For standard rsync file backups to external drives, it's an ok app. Most users will install timeshift thinking the software will just work for system snapshots, but it does not function correctly or restore correctly unless everything has been setup perfectly beforehand.

[@nelsono4315]

another excellent video. Thanks!

[@juliuco_nikel]

un máquina amigo , muchas gracias . One machine friend thanks very much

[@Klatsch_Batsch]

That was very helpfull. Thx you

[@maximus6884]

One other option is to boot another Linux distro and use timeshift on that to restore on our local disk. This is helpful when our local doesn't boot at all. E.g. when boot partition is broken.

[@CrystalMaidenFeetLover86]

Timeshift has one huge problem which makes it almost useless. When I actually had to restore a snapshot it wasn't possible, due to previously using an encrypted setup with luks. After a few searches it turns out this isn't a rare problem and people have had similar issues for years. So anyone who follows very basic opsec runs the risk of not being able to restore a snapshot. Of course you can still use the snapshots to manually copy files after manually setting up a new install, but this still leaves you with almost all of the hard work that comes with manually installing and configuring everything again.

[@eflinux]

You mean the current set up is not encrypted and previous one was?

[@CrystalMaidenFeetLover86]

@@eflinux Yes my previous setup was encrypted. To try and restore it I used a bootable USB but instead of running the install script I installed timeshift and triggered the restoration. First try I at least got something that looked like progress, but I had to cancel it. After that it never succeeded in starting the restoration, instead it said something about an unsupported file system (don't remember the details, this was more than a year ago)

[@1kwords]

Thank you!

[@think_outside_of_the_box]

Could you make a video about installing Arch Linux on ZFS?

[@paulb9769]

Obviously this is a couple of years old now but which do you prefer now Timeshift or Snapper?

[@will00451]

Hey my friend, I was a long time arch user, partially with your help, but recently fedora has felt like home. How do you feel about fedora?

[@Alfakatt]

Whatever floats your boat :)

[@JM-sn5eb]

Did you ever have a problem after bootloader upgrade? With with separate efi partition the /boot directory is not included in snapshot. After a bigger update I had to arch-chroot to my system and reinstall bootloader

[@eflinux]

Not really.

[@doctorsocrates4413]

Excellent video thank you..Extra subscription for you,

[@YannMetalhead]

Good video.

[@reimueller]

Thanks, now I know what to do. Is this also working with ext4 ? Take care.

[@eflinux]

No, with ext4 you'll have to boot from an external drive and restore from there.

[@dinozaurpickupline4221]

I'm wanting to install mx linux,instead of my goto lubuntu,but i want to backup my current config,so how do I do it with timeshift,do I reinstall from iso,going blank new then configure timeshift then recover from that backup?

[@lumac1232]

but do I enable Timeshift and Snapshots in Mageia Linux? cannot install snapshots in bytfs

[@craigdyke6131]

Great video as always, however I am unable to replicate on my current system :( My issue seems to be that when I try to launch a previous snapshot I see nothing about /boot also being rolled back to the previous information and hence if I have upgraded the linux kernel in that time (which has actually been my issue before and hence the need for rollback) it will not boot. Can you let me know if I have missed a step somewhere? I watched all of the April 2022 install AGAIN just to make sure, but I can't see what step I have missed?

[@greyshopleskin2315]

On the configuration assistant, you can choose what partitions you want to snapshot. If boot is in a separate partition, mark it. Also, check you don't have any filter to exclude /boot

[@lsatenstein]

Hi EF Montreal friend here. If you have a chance, give a review of SUSE leap 1.54. I believe it has timeshift built-into the distribution. It could be an interesting comparison to the above arch installation

[@mustafababdullah2485]

Ermonno have you experienced issues with the last couple of kernels with Nvidia hybreed? I have almost zero time to configure and fix issues so I put my Nvidia machine to mint with btrfs. No issues so far! Package names are quite different 😂 then arch.

[@cybersechs1368]

Hi Ermanno! Roughly, how big are these snapshots? I'm running a bootable ARCH install on a 64GB USB drive

[@draabuu]

Thanks!

[@MR-vj8dn]

How about a system with multiple partitions / disks and not only btrfs?

[@pranavraval194]

Could you please also create video if recovery using ArchISO?

[@isidzukuri]

same process, but you need first install cryptsetup luksOpen volume to mapper, then mount it, install timeshift from aur, chroot to mounted subvolumes. Be aware and mount all points (cat /mnt/etc/fstab). Then same process as video. OR Download Linux mint Una (20.3), make bootable usb from iso. That iso contain Timeshift. Launch it, if volumes not crypted, they will be seen by LiveOS. Timeshift able to restore from liveUSB\DVD. If crypted - follow first steps.

[@benzflynn]

Surely it's better to use a Live USB Install/Tryout version of the op system rather than fooling around with CLI ? In any case, many system boot failures will not even allow CLI.

[@eglinfo1]

What if your disk does not boot and the timeshift backup is on another disk

[@mc-not_escher]

Suggestion: Tutorial for Snapper + btrfs restore

[@justchillingafterwork9580]

Hey hermano could you make a video on how to load and unload kernel modules with systemd boot. I am having a problem with my on board network card it is recognized by the module r169 but it almost never works I downloaded r8168 as it is suggested in the wiki however I do not know how to set it as default. I tried poking around with the guidelines on the earth wiki and now I have no internet I'm sorry for the crappy syntax I'm on mobile.

[@arijitkumarhaldar3197]

Hello Arch users...is there anyone here who has an Atheros wifi adapter on their laptop? It started disconnecting everytime some network activity started both on the linux and linux-lts kernels starting from around mid-March. I rolled back, and its working fine now. But..do anyone know if the issue is fixed upstream or not? I won't be able to update the kernel anymore if they don't solve it. Its now on the ignore list on pacman config right now

[@mateuszkolbusz4115]

But why in my case system hits emergency mode after restore? This occtured only if kernel version was different. There is any way to repair this?

[@eflinux]

Do you have autosnap installed?

[@mateuszkolbusz4115]

@@eflinux yes

[@39zack]

And now I found out why restore with timeshift on btfs does not work if you have installed Arch with the installarch script, the subvol are set to / for both / and /home, not /@ and /@home

[@dragonek_gnu_linux_pl]

one problem with timeshift-autosnap is very big size of these snapshots :D

[@eflinux]

That's why it's important to set the schedule properly.

[@Steven_nevetS]

I agree.

[@ImZaDi-love]

What about auto snap for Fedora?

[@raidtheferry]

Doesn't btrfs ruin SSDs?

[@peterjansen4826]

Ermanno, do you have a son called Damiano? Because there is a guy called Damiano Ferrari who studies computerscience in the north of Italy (Brescia) and contributed to unsnap. Such a coincidence if it is not family.

[@eflinux]

No, I don't have children.

[@kencole4850]

I'm a retired university professor. I've taught all my life. I have to explain things to people who know nothing. Even if you don't change your rhetorical pattern, it would help if you didn't talk so fast. All this technical language is rolling off your tongue so fast. Yes, I can pause the video and listen again, but you say the *buss words* so fast that I can't hear exactly what you are saying so I can't google them.

[@eflinux]

Thanks for the feedback.

[@adamg6453]

I appreciate the pace of these videos, they're right to the point and don't waste time with triviality. I don't believe these videos are geared towards the beginner. I don't find I have any issue with following along.

[@sotecluxan4221]

[@Jabok123]

no such command exists

[@M.4y]

timeshift wont start:    ~  timeshift-launcher  ✔ localuser:root being added to access control list (timeshift-gtk:64208): Gtk-WARNING **: 14:42:29.893: cannot open display: localuser:root being removed from access control list access control enabled, only authorized clients can connect SI:localuser:may