It is almost on default settings, I have not set anything special. I installed Manjaro KDE in January with a BTRFS filesystem. By default timeshift takes a snapshot every day. I turned that off in the GUI. Now every update (pamac upgrade -a) takes a snapshot. I have not set this up separately.
I just don’t want a snapshot to be taken on an AUR update. I want to continue using pamac.
Indeed if it takes a snapshot for each AUR package and you have many, then yes in this case I would understand. But I definitely would want a snapshot taken after all AUR packages are installed/updated.
On the other hand, with BTRFS snapshots are instantaneous so what’s the deal here?
Taking snapshots in Btrfs is almost “free”. The current status of the file system is noted without any additional effort. Only the release of free memory is delayed until the snapshot is deleted.
The effort for snapshots arises when they are deleted. Snapshots that are deleted after a short time (e.g. within a day) lead to an almost negligible effort.
In this respect, it would also be possible to create the snapshot (automatically) and delete it in the course of a day
The effort that arises when deleting a snapshot is exactly the effort that btrfs was able to save when creating the snapshot. So it’s almost a zero-sum game.