Playing with snapper and snapper-gui

[jfabernathy]

Now that I have my production media server running on BTRFS taking daily snapshots using a script, I wanted to build a test system that's more of a software development workstation so having automatic snapshots taken when new stuff is installed is more important.

I thought I'd explore snapper and snapper-gui to see if that's a solution for me. I did the standard Kubuntu install so I ended up with @ and @home subvolumes and after snapper was installed and configured I had a .snapshots subvolume and a @home/.snapshots subvolume.

At this point snapper creates snapshots of @ every time I run 'apt' and install something. I also see hourly snapshots of @ and @home. The system doesn't seem to create a snapshot of @home when an apt package is installed. Which to me is wrong. If you install an application that has a KDE menu there are now config files in /home/$USER/.... and they should be saved in pre/post snapshots so when you have to roll back the app and it's user data can be recovered.

At this point I have a matching pair of snapshots for @ and @home taken every hour. And I guess I could get used to creating my own snapshots of @ and @home before any install something but that doesn't help you if you forget.

Is this just a configuration issue that I've missed somewhere??

[GreyGeek]

Should I assume that you manually created your snapper configuration for @home?
I had to do that before it would create snapshots of home.
https://www.kubuntuforums.net/forum/...nual#post72382

[jfabernathy]

Should I assume that you manually created your snapper configuration for @home?
I had to do that before it would create snapshots of home.
https://www.kubuntuforums.net/forum/...nual#post72382

That post looks like something I will spent some time reading as it follows some of the questions I have.

I did create my snapper config for home the same way I created the one for root.

[jlittle]

Maybe you want GreyGeek's solution to this, which is to not have @home, just have everything in @.

The configuration in question is in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/80snapper. In principle, you could copy this, and add the corresponding snapper commands for @home, then use -c=config_file on the apt commands you use. (Configuration given on the commands overrides other sources of configuration.) Looks ugly, though, about 10 lines of shell script squashed in to one line, though it could be simplified.

[jfabernathy]

Maybe you want GreyGeek's solution to this, which is to not have @home, just have everything in @.

The configuration in question is in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/80snapper. In principle, you could copy this, and add the corresponding snapper commands for @home, then use -c=config_file on the apt commands you use. (Configuration given on the commands overrides other sources of configuration.) Looks ugly, though, about 10 lines of shell script squashed in to one line, though it could be simplified.

You're right about the ugly script code. It puzzles me why "they" seem to ignore home and leave it as an exercise to the user. The reason I'm sensitive to this is in early playing with KDE on Arch I made the mistake of installing kde-applications and got a million apps that I really didn't want. Uninstalling kde-applications took the apps away but left all the menu items for apps that no longer existed because their menu items in the launcher were in my /home/ directories.

[jfabernathy]

I see why a number of you have mentioned that you chose the manual or your own script method to manage snapshots. IMHO snapper was too complicated and the automatic/timed snapshots created more problems that it solved.

The final straw was when I installed a new software package that I had also installed on my Media server that uses the manual method I documented at https://www.kubuntuforums.net/forum/...ential-backups. The installation required a reboot and after that reboot I had no taskbar at the bottom of the screen. I could not easily fix this and I wasted a lot of time trying to recover to a older snapshot. So I just did a new install. This time, no snapper, and I installed the new package I wanted without issue.

So back to just doing manual snapshots with my own scripts.

[GreyGeek]

The snapshot commands are so simple and easy that sometimes I don't even use my script.
I just do "history" and then !somenumber to redo that command for mounting and creating snapshots, just changing the day, hour and minute extension.

[jfabernathy]

If you manually do snapshots before some update just to protect yourself, do you do them Read-only'? I know you need the '-r' if you're going to send/receive to a backup drive, but it seems to save you a step not to '-r' for a snapshot that will be deleted after you're sure that your update was successful.