I've been using Timeshift a while, and i think i can summarise my feelings of as thusly:
Essential.
Awful.
It does the job, so i won't focus on that. I feel like moaning...
The UI
Ugly: I think it was made in the late naughties... and it looks the same now as then. Pretty bad.
Confusing: "include only hidden files". Oh, and directories, but it doesn't tell you that. Cron email: how?!
Inflexible
Schedule: Monthly/Weekly/Daily/Hourly/Boot. When in the month? When in the week? When in the day? Presumably the clock starts ticking when you run your first snapshot. Too bad if i want it to run at, say, 0900 daily - when i'm not playing any games or whatever.
Destination: One gets to chose a device... that's it! Too bad if i want something other than "/timeshift".
Doesn't work on Fedora btrfs. Nobara managed to hack something together to get it working though. Something to do with default btrfs snapshot names or something. Fedora does it differently apparently. I've decided to avoid Fedora/spins for now. Tired of the differences between it and Debian/Ubuntu world.
What i find quite interesting is that no one has made a comparable tool, but just a weeny bit more flexible (nothing drastic) and vastly more attractive, with a more intuitive/explanatory interface. It's such a valuable tool, and with some pretty basic (and some less basic) limitations, that i'm surprised there's really no alternative.
I copied a script from some place online a long time ago which kind of replicates what Timeshift does. But because it's pure bash shell, it's very limited. It did the same basic job of rsyncing and eliminating duplicates. And it was good if i wanted to restore a file or a group of files. But it's no "tool". It didn't have any logic to type script.sh restore snapshot date or whatever. That was a totally manual affair.
Timeshift is so valuable that if i wasn't so time poor and untalented it would excite me to learn how to code so i could "fix" it.
Concentrate on that part . If I'm ever going to do anything I'm not too sure about (often) I take an on-demand snapshot. But if something that I didn't ask for screws up my device, I can go back to yesterday, and I can live with that better than I could live with having to reinstall the OS. It's a magical piece of software that just works and has saved me a number of times.
I liked your comment about Fedora. I spent hours on one of my laptops trying to create the sub-volume partitions that Timeshift requires (@ instead of /) and finally gave up. I'll stick with Zorin.
I cover Timeshift in the Unofficial Manual with screenshots of the different elements. My default settings are not to include /home which is off by default anyway, it is really about restoring the system to an earlier time if things go wrong. Personally I don't find the interface irksome, and I would never dream of using btrfs, as much as I would never dream of using ReiserFS.
My setting is usually 3 snapshots a day, and because /home is pretty large I save snapshots there.
My only gripe is of my own doing. I created a snapshot of a system that wouldn't boot to an external drive that was formatted to NTFS, it always has to be the same file format as the system.
If you can't boot at all, drop to a tty login screen (Ctrl+ Alt+ F2 through F6) and enter after login:
sudo timeshift --restore
and then choose the number of the image you wish to restore.
If this is not possible, I keep a copy of Linux Mint handy, boot into live mode and use Timeshift from there. More distributions should be like LM in having Timeshift as a recovery tool.
i have 2 nvme drives on this machine 0 is the main drive that boots up zorin 1 is the other drive that i keep steam games on and thats where i do my timeshifts...if stuff goes way bad and my system clone backup fails i can do a fresh install of zorin pro then install timeshift point it to the drive where the time shift is a created then restore from that to get me backup and running.....always good to have a plan B...and a C
Always Ext4 FS. I still see it as experimental (just my take), even though it has been around a long time. When you have a solid file system, why mess with anything else? zfs is another. I like stability over anything else. Ext4 FS has proved itself to be stable. Others who used these other file systems may have had a good experience. Guess I am stuck in my ways. I like to play safe.
I was on btrfs with Nobara. The Timeshift worked great, almost instant due to integration with the btrfs snapshotting. Rsync is much slower.
I can't say for sure, but my experience with btrfs was that it was perfectly reliable, but i did seem to have some performance issues after a while. Firefox got particularly bad but i don't know how much of that was a bloated history/cache and whatever. Though i did clear most things every time i closed FF. I read something somewhere about how btrfs doesn't play as nicely with some use-cases, but it is improving over time. I use btrfs (not my choice) as my cache drive in unRAID and it created weirdness when i tried to rsync backup my docker folder (not docker file, as is the default in unRAID). It copied literally millions of files. It seemed to just loop around constantly, like everything is a symlink or something. I don't get it, something to do with how btrfs and docker works.
I went back to ext4 for Kubuntu. It's tried and tested and i had no problems with in years past.
It is interesting that "Linux" has for so long relied on this Timeshift tool and no one has really integrated the same capability into their distro in a 'coherent' way.
Linux Mint now maintains Timeshift, so there's a chance they'll eventually do more with it to better embed it. I don't know, but i suspect it probably still uses gtk2? It certainly looks like it
. If I'm ever going to do anything I'm not too sure about (often) I take an on-demand snapshot. But if something that I didn't ask for screws up my device, I can go back to yesterday, and I can live with that better than I could live with having to reinstall the OS. It's a magical piece of software that just works and has saved me a number of times.
I always had to look it up. I had to use it at least 3 times in my ~2 years on Nobara.