Timeshift restore to empty drive fails to boot (cryptouuid error)

[andreas85]

@Aragorn

Note: We are of course talking about a backup made with rsync here, not of a btrfs snapshot — which is not a backup.

I agree

Except when the snapshots are copied to an external drive via btrfs-send

@Aragorn

Yes, but you can manually restore those again from an earlier backup. timeshift’s rsync’d backups can be browsed just like any other directory. You only have to pick the right directory and then use “cp -RPp” as root to restore the pertinent directories and files with full preservation of permissions and ownership information.

Yes, but this also applies to Btrfs snapshots.

You can mount and browse any of them. Separately for snapshots of “/” and for snapshots of “/home”

@dmt

Despite what many say, Timeshift is not a backup utility, it’s a system restore utility. There’s a reason why /home is excluded by default, if you restore your system then your data also gets restored which causes data loss. Don’t include /home in Timeshift, use an actual backup utility for data.

You are right if you use automatic restore with Timeshift

If you use Btrfs snapshots of “/” and “/home”, however, they are stored separately. This is done this way by Snapper, but also by Timeshift.
So you could restore

• only “/”
• or only “/home”
• or you could restore “/” from a snapshot from three weeks ago
• and “/home” from yesterday
  Whether Timeshift’s GUI allows this is another topic , but the files are there. And they are freely accessible (after a simple mount)