I use a manjaro xfce 21.0.5 dual booted with windows 10. I have kept windows in the ssd, while manjaro in a partiton of hard drive.
I always have a backup using timeshift, in which I include all hidden files of home folder and all contents of root directory.
But, lately, I have installed CS:GO and so , the backup takes about a full day, to what it took 30-1 hour earlier. So, I want to know if I go by the definition and exclude my home and root directories from the backup, then whether my backup is fully secured or not. I am confused about this . Please help
Rest , I am fully enjoying myself on this distro. Kudos to the developers.
Although timeshift can be used to include your home directory in the backups ─ as you are doing and as I myself also do ─ the developer of the software recommends against the inclusion of the home directories.
That said, you can still include your home directory but add an exclusion for the directory containing your game(s). Just add the directory you want to exclude and make sure that it has a “-” in front of it instead of a “+”.
Do you include the entire home and root directory or only hidden files of home?
Please reply. Also, is it necessary to update at each new stable version?
All of it, except for ~/.cache, but I think that’s excluded by default.
Impatient, are we?
If you mean whether you should install updates whenever the update notifier icon starts flashing, then the answer is that it is best to do so. Manjaro is a curated rolling release, and if you wait too long with updating, then your system may become incoherent and things will start breaking.
If on the other hand you mean whether you should reinstall the system from the updated installation .iso, then the answer is “no”. Once installed, you never need to reinstall again ─ unless you do something really stupid, of course ─ because applying the updates will always bring your system to the latest release.
Thank you for your quick replies
Approx , then it means you include the complete home and root directory, except that cache part. This should make the time to make the snapshot quite large. Can you give me your time, to make your snapshot. Mine was taking around 1 full day, so had to uninstall the game
Taking a snapshot on my system takes about five to ten minutes, depending on whether there was a major update between the previous snapshot and the current one or not. If there were no updates, then it usually only takes about a minute, or maybe two.
However, as I told you higher up, you can explicitly exclude directories in your $HOME from getting backed up by timeshift. Click on “Settings” and then on “Filters” before you make your backup.
That was pretty quick time for generating snapshots. What do you prefer to exclude apart from cache when including the whole and root directory? A simple guide in the correct direction may also help me to decrease my time.
I uninstalled the game, still, my first snapshot is taking 4 hours. I have included the hidden files of the home and complete files of root directory. Do you suggest I should reinstall the system or where can the problem lie? Can you give suggestions? I use stacer to clean up the system very often.
I have no idea. First of all, it makes a difference whether we’re talking of SSDs or HDDs. You’ve put Manjaro on a HDD, but I don’t know what you are copying your snapshots to. If it’s another HDD, then the speed of the bus may matter, but that is even more the case if you are copying to a USB stick.
Another thing that’s also important is how much RAM you have, and how many processor cores. The more cores and the more RAM, the faster it’ll be. With less RAM available, your system may have to swap whatever applications you are currently running in order to make room for caching the files it must copy to the backup medium.
Also, if you’re making your snapshots on the same HDD as where you’ve installed Manjaro, then it will really take a long time, and especially for copying large amounts of data.
I’m not a gamer and I have no idea how much space that game takes up, but my backups are usually only about 15 GiB ─ the initial backup took longer because it also had to copy over all of my music files and videos, but those are not changing anymore, so it now no longer has to copy them over.
Okay, got it. I was saving my snapshot to a usb thumb drive. My whole manjaro size is 26 gb out of 220 gb, with 16 gb ram and 4 gb swap volume,
but my way of including the hidden files of home and complete root directory is correct,right??
I guess, if I would make backup on the hard drive, it would be faster. Let me wait for 3 hours , then I can see how much my backup takes storage.
Also, thank you for your replies.
And what is your manjaro size? do you use hdd or ssd and where do you put your snapshots?
If you’re storing your snapshots on a USB stick, then I’m not surprised it takes hours to copy all that over. And if that USB stick doesn’t have a Linux-native filesystem on it, then timeshift cannot make incremental backups, which means that it must literally copy over everything for every snapshot.
I have my operating system installed on an SATA-3 SSD, but spread out across multiple physical partitions. My /usr takes up the most space and that’s only about 7.3 GiB. /var takes up about 3.5 GiB and /home about 2.4 GiB. My multimedia are all under /srv, and that’s 75 GiB, but like I said, that rarely ever changes.
I store my snapshots on a partition on an internal SATA-2 HDD. All of my filesystems ─ including the one with the backups ─ are btrfs with level 3 compression.
I have formatted my thumb drive to ext4 file system to store incremental snapshots.
So, I guess you would backup your usr, var and home. I have ext4 file system and I backup my hidden files in the home and my complete root directory, and I can exclude /home/ayusha/.local/share/steam where my games are kept. I want to know if this is safe for system restore options.
I have seen the git repo of timeshift that I run the risk of having my hidden files and root directory overwritten, still you also backup your home as you have stated above. Can you say something about that?
I guess, I too will reinstall manjaro with architect to use btrfs file system later, and use a sata hdd for backups.
The developer shows an exlude list at github. This could be a starting point. I wouldn’t exclude all of /home, but I might consider doing it separately. It seems there is a distinguish being made between system and restoring that to a point-in-time, and user. HHHmmmm…
It is designed to protect only system files and settings.
