Reinstating Snapshots with SNAPPER

[Star Gazer]

I have been using a Linux Distro which uses the SNAPPER Program, and had 3 subvolumes for personal use that I have been keeping snapshots of. Now, I do not know how to access them. I tried recreating the configs, but get the error:

create subvolume failed, ioctl(BTRFS_IOC_SUBVOL_CREATE) failed, errno:17 (File exists)

Well, I do know it exists, but I am trying to access them and use the configs (like hourly or manual snapshots) of what is already been there.

Cliff

[Star Gazer]

Somehow or another, I managed to get it all working now! Just wish I knew how I did it for sure to help others.

[GreyGeek]

I am curious about your snapper config file settings. I used snapper for a while (and even wrote a script to use it) . The default settings was creating TOO MANY snapshots and almost ate up my entire disk space. I found that turning off the timeline, setting everything to 0 and creating singletons worked a lot better for me.

While using snapper I never had a problem which required that I roll back to a previous snapshot OR use the undochange feature.

What I ended up doing was removing snapper, upgrading from btrfs-progs to btrfs-tools (repository), because it has more features and gives a better estimate of the free disk space. I mount the live system (sda1) to /mnt manually create ro snapshots of @ and @home (@YYYYMMDD and @homeYYYYMMDD). I mount my 500Gb USB Passport drive (sdb1) to /backup (a dir I created for the purpose) and use btrfs send & receive to transfer the backups to the USB drive, which was formatted using btrfs. I also use the -f parameter of the send command to send an ASCII file of the @ and @home backups. Then I delete the previous backups from /mnt and unmount both /mnt and /backup. I thought about writing a script for the process but it is so easy I decided to why bother. That's why I also set aside looking at btrbk as a possible backup tool.

There are some great posts about Btrfs on this forum. Do a search for "oshunluver btrfs" to find them.

[#]BTRFS[/#]

[jlittle]

... Now, I do not know how to access them..

(I'm not sure I understand what you are asking, but in case you want to access the files. )
Snapper creates snapshots in a .snapshots directory. To access the files in those snapshots, say in dolphin, turn on "show hidden files" and go into that .snapshots directory, then into the directories there.

I mention this because it's so simple and obvious that firstly no-one bothers to state it, and secondly I took a while to get it.

Regards, John Little

[GreyGeek]

IIRC, the snapper config file will be in /etc/snapper/config. Use "locate" to find "snapper".
When you find it post the contents here.

[steve7233]

I can't get snapper to run it seems very broken.

[GreyGeek]

Snapper is not broken but its instructions are sparse and obtuse. The root and home config settings have to be sparse because it will create so many snapshots it will eat up your HD in no time. My summary of Snapper is here: https://www.kubuntuforums.net/showth...snapper+script
Msg #11 in that thread summarizes my opinion about Snapper.

I wrote a script to make the creation of singletons easy (and posted it here: https://www.kubuntuforums.net/showth...l=1#post376530), BUT, I found that it was just as quick to do so manually and so I removed Snapper.

Read through ALL the posts in that first thread I cited above. If your HP can take it I suggest that you install VirtualBox, create a static virtual HD (fixed size, say 50GB), use Btrfs as the fs, and practice your Btrfs skills in that VirtualBox and not on your live system.

There are several excellent postings by Oshunluver concerning btrfs, I suggest you read them all before you try to do anything with btrfs.