Timeshift Caveats

This is how I normally use Timeshift. Once installed, I set it up using the 'rsync' option and use my '/home' partition which fills most of the drive. Depending on how big your drive is may determine how many snapshots you want to keep. I set this to 5 but you could drop this to 3. Then I take a snapshot and let it do its thing.

Now for the caveats. I had a failed upgrade from Devuan 3.1.1 to Devuan 4.0. I tried to use the restore commands at boot time:

sudo timeshift --restore

to start the process off but I had problems in that 'var' was too big. I decided I would try to copy everything in my /home folder to an external drive - and this is where you need to be careful. In the past I did not rely so much on Timeshift, just did straight backups of /home contents (including hidden folders - Ctrl+ H if they are not showing) and copying and pasting to external HD's formatted to NTFS - if you do this with a Timeshift folder it won't work as it looks for the format of the installation used, Ext4 - so if ever you are going to use Timeshift to an external drive, you may not want to use the entire drive for Timeshift, then you should shrink the NTFS drive and create an Ext4 Partition. You have been warned!

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Thanks for the guide. I have ordered a SanDisk 1 TB Extreme Pro Portable SSD to use as an external backup device and was wondering which file system to use. I will format the entire device as EXT4.

Lou

Does anyone know if TimeShift works with the ZFS file system?

Or should I just use external drives added to the zpool as redundancy, so if the internal drive has a glitch (bad sector), that data's on the external drives?

I'm already running one SSD as an L2ARC cache drive (somewhat akin to Windows ReadyBoost).

I have never used that file system but suspect the caveat remains in that if you are saving Timeshift snapshots to an external device then such device should be formatted with the same file system in use on your machine.

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See, but that's the weird thing... the ZFS file system doesn't really have a 'file system' per se, nor does it mount the drives.

When I set up my L2ARC cache drive (akin to Windows ReadyBoost) on an external SSD, I deleted the partition to destroy the data on the drive, created a new partition, didn't format it, then issued the command: zpool add rpool cache sdb1. The zpool status rpool command shows its added to the rpool as a cache drive, and right now it's got about 3.4 GB of data on it.

That's why I was asking whether it'd just be better to add the new drive as a member of rpool, so that the data is redundant across all the drives in that pool.

ZFS takes snapshots, as well, and adds them to the Grub menu so you can roll back if something glitches. So it might be that Timeshift is just doing what ZFS does, for non-ZFS systems.

Found this on Github: