btrfs timeshift questions on latest KDE neon

[jfabernathy]

I add the ppa for timeshift to the Neon install, but 24.06.3 still have the 60 sec delay.

[jfabernathy]

So I did a fresh install of Neon 6.2 with 2 partitions, efi, and root (btrfs). No changes to the fstab so no compression or noatime. I install timeshift from the ppa and the initial snapshot was 1 second.

I then install libreoffice from flatpak. Took snapshot and it only took 1 second. So good so far.

[jfabernathy]

So after I install mythtv-frontend from the ppa:mythbuntu/34 my timeshift snapshot took 60 seconds. I restored to the snapshot before this and I'm back to 1 sec for a snapshot. So what's going on??

[jfabernathy]

My next test was to install kodi media player from flatpak and then take a snapshot. it was only 1 second. So seems to be related to mythfrontend. However, I install that app on all my system under all Linux distros.

[jlittle]

Did you try running the notify-send? If I run it as root it stalls as your report:

sudo notify-send -t 10000 -u low -i gtk-dialog-info 'TimeShift BTRFS Snapshot saved successfully (0s)' -h string:desktop-entry:timeshift-gtk
[sudo] password for john:
Error calling StartServiceByName for org.freedesktop.Notifications: Timeout was reached​

(Note the added quotes.) Without sudo it runs fine. I do not have timeshift.

[jlittle]

I'm not sure it's worth it, but you could try the solution given by https://stackoverflow.com/questions/...y-send-as-root.

If I run

sudo -u john DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=$DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS notify-send -t 10000 -u low -i gtk-dialog-info 'TimeShift BTRFS Snapshot saved successfully (0s)' -h string:desktop-entry:timeshift-gtk

the notify works. For the solution to work, you'd have to use the script in the solution (not the command above), and put it ahead of /usr/bin/notify-send in the path that sudo uses, maybe /usr/local/bin. If you do so I would change "notify-send" in the script to "/usr/bin/notify-send" to stop the script trying to run itself.

That this works, and the gtk references, suggests that timeshift sometimes trips up with plasma; perhaps some Gnome/plasma difference in interpretation of the desktop standard.

[jfabernathy]

Thanks, John. What happens when you use the Timeshift GUI to create a backup is you first click on the create button in Timeshift's toolbar. It pops up a status window with a progress line and with a close button at the bottom. However, with BTRFS on all other distros, that window closes on its own in under a second. Comparing that to timshift run from the command line you see the snapshot is actually created in 1 second and you wait the minute for the close of the window or the finish of the cli command.

It makes since that it's an interaction between timeshift and the KDE DE.

[jfabernathy]

To test :
sudo notify-send -t 10000 -u low -i gtk-dialog-info 'TimeShift BTRFS Snapshot saved successfully (0s)' -h string:desktop-entry:timeshift-gtk

I had to install libnotify-bin and after that the command did stall.

[jfabernathy]

I took the coward's way out and just complete uninstalled timeshift and deleted all it's snapshots.

Then I did what I usually do when playing with an archlinux distro like Endeavour OS, I installed snapper and btrfs-assistant. I also installed grub-btrfs. Snapper on *buntu distros does automatic pre/post apt snapshots so if an apt install screws up something you can just restore using btrfs-assistant. I also like the easy way btrfs-assistant configures snapper. There is a script you can use to make the pre/post APT descriptions more complete and I always do that.
https://gist.github.com/imthenachoma...2a3b2d83263118

The only down side is on an *buntu Linux I can't boot the read-only snapshot like I can on EOS. They use dracut instead of mkinitcpio and enable an overlayfs so you can test out the bootable snapshot without modifying anything.

The workaround is to have a bootable USB with btrfs-assistant and snapper installed so you can recover from a bad crash.