I have a Timeshift question.
In case of crash, like a major update and the system is in limbo to the point of not booting anymore. How/where do I get timeshift from?
My setup is:
manjarotimeshift snapshots. It’s plugged in only when needed.I checked the manjaro iso and I don’t see a timeshift program.
Do I need to keep a separate systemrescuecd usb to boot and restore?
Thanks
I see it in Pamac and it’s in my System menu.
sudo pacman -S timeshift
pamac install timeshift
or from the main menu Add/remove Software (aka pamac-manager)
Click on the magnifying glass icon and type timeshift into the search bar.
Select it by clicking the checkbox, then click apply (at the bottom of the window.)
No. Manjaro is not Windows. timeshift will provide the required restore points. Just reboot after the rollback. You may need a USB with a Manjaro system on it, if the system is not bootable, prior to the roll back.
It’s a good idea to store the timeshift backups on a separate HDD/SSD.
Are you saying that :
manjaro current ISOor
manjaro then do timeshift and my recovery?Thanks
I am assuming you already have Manjaro installed on a computer.
So:
Thanks
No you do not have to reinstall timeshift is on the live cd, where your restores are is a different matter.
No.
Why do you want to reinstall Manjaro?
Do you not have timeshift backups?
If you don’t you still don’t have to reinstall.
Tell us what the problem is, so we can help you fix it.
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Switch to console (Ctrl+Alt+F2)
Login
sudo timeshift --restore
?
Yes, you should always keep a bootable USB thumbdrive handy with the latest version of Manjaro flashed to it, so that you can boot from that to do a Timeshift restore operation or a manual repair if your Manjaro system became unbootable.
Timeshift can be run from the command line or a graphical interface, but you would need Manjaro up and running on a live USB to run the Timeshift program. So in the hypothetical case you describe where your Manjaro system had become unbootable, you would need to boot from the USB thumbdrive you had prepared ahead of time. (I use BalenaEtcher to create this USB, or your could also use SUSE Studio Imagewriter to flash a USB thumbdrive with the Manjaro ISO.)
You might need to boot from the live USB and then chroot into your damaged system so Timeshift could properly restore permissions to your normal drive. Would someone more knowledgeable than I please expound on this?
Then once you got the Timeshift GUI program running you could change the settings to reflect where your snapshots were stored on the external USB drive, and then perform the restoration to your normal drive, after which you would shut down, disconnect the USB drives, and try to boot to see if the restoration fixed whatever was preventing your machine from booting.
I think it may be important what type of file system format your external USB drive uses (where the snapshots are stored) and what type of file system format your Manjaro system drive uses when using Timeshift, if you are using the RSYNC protocol. For example, I store Timeshift snapshots made using RSYNC on an external USB drive, but both that external USB drive and the drive in my desktop PC where Manjaro is installed are formatted with the EXT-4 file system. So researching such things is recommended before you make your snapshots, so that Timeshift can properly back up and restore file ownership and permissions.
I recommend reading the docs and understanding what timeshift is and isn’t. i.e. it isn’t a full backup solution, and by default it doesn’t include your home folder which arguably is where your important stuff is. Theoretically if you backup your home folder and perhaps a change or two elsewhere you could just install a fresh system and any other packages you had installed, then restore your home folder to get you back into the state you had before things went wrong.
Timeshift effectively rolls back your system to a previous snapshot, ideally immediately before your upgrade if you don’t want to reinstall your whole system.
Manjaro installs include btrfs-grub which makes btrfs snapshots available via your grub menu, so you can boot from a previous snapshot in the event a system upgrade goes wrong.
If grub is broken, then you may need to boot from a live USB and chroot into the broken system and run timeshift to restore the previous snapshot.
DISCLAIMER: I have luckily not used timeshift in anger and may have some of this incorrect.
Perhaps it’s not included in the minimal ISOs, but it should normally always be included in the full ISOs.
Bananamangodog makes a good point about Timeshift not including home directories by default.
Personally since I use EXT-4 and backup snapshots to an external drive, I use a backup strategy that includes Timeshift, Backintime (which also saves RSYNC snapshots to the external drive), and Clonezilla.
Clonezilla is free to download and use to make a restorable image of my disk including the partition table and boot partition. I can use the Clonezilla snapshot to restore my system to a point in time when it would boot and everything was working. Then I can boot to that state and run Timeshift to restore to the state of the last snapshot I saved to my external disk. I DO have Timeshift configured to save hidden files in the home directories on my computer (which I share with other family members who have their own login accounts). And then I run Backintime as root to save unhidden files in the home directories. Every time I save a Timeshift snapshot to my external disk I also save a Backintime snapshot immediately afterward. And I make these snapshots far more frequently than the Clonezilla images. But I have had to restore my system using this backup strategy and everything worked perfectly afterward, but of course I ended up with a system that didn’t contain anything that had been created or modified since the most recent snapshots.
This is the exact case (that nobody acknowledge ever happens) where I told everybody that BTRFS is far superior to EXT4 for regular users.
Case you have had you root in BTRFS you just need to reboot in the last working session in the grub menu. No external backups are needed. Sure, for enterprises this is a no go. But we’re talking of regular users.
This is my daily full backup; it currently takes about 7 minutes. It’s no masterpiece, but it does the job and has already saved my neck.
#!/bin/bash
datum="$(date +%d-%m-%Y_%H.%M)"
cd /mnt/Backup/patrice-ws/Workstation && rm -rf $(ls --color=never -t | tail -n +8)
mkdir -p /mnt/Backup/patrice-ws/Workstation/$datum
# Mit sfdisk Partitionslayout von /dev/nvme0n1 sichern
sudo sfdisk -d /dev/nvme0n1 > /mnt/Backup/patrice-ws/Workstation/$datum/nvme0n1.table
sudo chown patrice:patrice /mnt/Backup/patrice-ws/Workstation/$datum/nvme0n1.table
# EFI und Bootpartition sichern
sudo dd if=/dev/nvme0n1p1 status=none | zstd -10 -T0 > /mnt/Backup/patrice-ws/Workstation/$datum/nvme0n1p1.img.zst
sudo dd if=/dev/nvme0n1p2 status=none | zstd -10 -T0 > /mnt/Backup/patrice-ws/Workstation/$datum/nvme0n1p2.img.zst
# /dev/nvme0n1p3 nach /mnt/temp als Top-Level-Subvolume mounten
sudo mount -o subvolid=5 /dev/nvme0n1p3 /mnt/temp
# Snapshot der Subvolumes erstellen
sudo btrfs subvolume snapshot -r /mnt/temp/@ /mnt/temp/@_backup
sudo btrfs subvolume snapshot -r /mnt/temp/@home /mnt/temp/@home_backup
sudo btrfs subvolume snapshot -r /mnt/temp/@cache /mnt/temp/@cache_backup
sudo btrfs subvolume snapshot -r /mnt/temp/@log /mnt/temp/@log_backup
# Snapshot kopmprimiert an Backuplaufwerk senden
sudo btrfs send /mnt/temp/@_backup | zstd -f -T0 -10 -o /mnt/Backup/patrice-ws/Workstation/$datum/@.img.zst
sudo btrfs send /mnt/temp/@home_backup | zstd -f -T0 -10 -o /mnt/Backup/patrice-ws/Workstation/$datum/@home.img.zst
sudo btrfs send /mnt/temp/@cache_backup | zstd -f -T0 -10 -o /mnt/Backup/patrice-ws/Workstation/$datum/@cache.img.zst
sudo btrfs send /mnt/temp/@log_backup | zstd -f -T0 -10 -o /mnt/Backup/patrice-ws/Workstation/$datum/@log.img.zst
# Snapshots löschen
sudo btrfs subvolume delete /mnt/temp/@_backup
sudo btrfs subvolume delete /mnt/temp/@home_backup
sudo btrfs subvolume delete /mnt/temp/@cache_backup
sudo btrfs subvolume delete /mnt/temp/@log_backup
# /dev/nvme0n1p3 aushängen
sudo umount /mnt/temp
I agree that BTRFS is the better solution, and I wish it had been available as the default format when I installed Manjaro on my computer in 2017. I still need to learn what would be involved to keep backups of a BTRFS system on an external drive that could be stored offsite.
It’s no different from backing up from an ext4 filesystem. You simply tell timeshift to use rsync instead of btrfs snapshotting.
You then select the directories you want to include (in addition to the default, which is everything except for /home and /root), and you tell it what filesystem to store the backups on — e.g. on my system, I store my backups on /dev/sdb1.
Oh, wow, that’s good to know. Thank you so much!
It looks like timeshift (and maybe rsync) is (are) more sophisticated than I was giving credit for (i.e. no need for manjaro-chroot when restoring a system snapshot using timeshift running on the live USB, unless you need to manually rebuild initramfs).
Yes, you can install it to the running system, but as it’s booted from an iso it won’t be permanent (next time you boot the iso you’ll have to install it again).
However, as @Aragorn said, that should only be required with the minimal iso.
Good you have the Timeshift backups
You need to boot up on the USB that has the Manjaro iso. That is how you access the timeshift application.
As I said before Manjaro is Not Windows. It doesn’r work the same ways as systemrescuecd
The USB with the Manjaro ISO is a Live Manjaro System that can be booted into.