Recover missing files

[mr_raider]

So for anyone who games on Linux, you probaly have experience with the horrible EA app. Without getting into details, suffice it to say that cloud syncing game saves is poorly implemented feature in the app, and frequently the sync borks deleting save games.

Now I know the folder where the saves are held, and it sits within a btrfs subvolume.

How can I recover those saves, since they must have been there and were erased by the EA app during a sync

[Snowhog]

Now I know the folder where the saves are held, and it sits within a btrfs subvolume.

Unless you have been creating regular snapshots, recovering a deleted file(s) isn't possible.

[mr_raider]

IS their a tool to automate snapshots?

[jlittle]

IS their a tool to automate snapshots?

I use snapper just for this, snapshotting hourly. It has on occasion made recovering from screw-ups very easy. The tool keeps the number of snapshots under control, and this has required manual editing of config files. Full snapper as installed in OpenSuse does booting into snapshots but I don't do that, and IIUC it doesn't work with Ubuntu, which doesn't support changing the default subvolume. My use of snapper complements my backup regime, which has weekly (ish) snapshots for incremental backups.

btrbk also automates sending the snapshots to a backup. I have no experience with it. I can't imagine why one couldn't do frequent snapshots with it.

[claydoh]

I use Timeshift for this purpose, which has a useful and simple UI for BTRFS snapshots for both scheduling, restoring, and browsing the snapshots. It IS limited to your root and home subvolumes, though. But it is very solid and easy to use, even if you needed to restore a snapshot on the commandline, where it walks you through the selection and restore process.

There is a tool called btrfs-assistant that is a UI for Snapper, which is now available in Ubuntu in 26.04 (There is a PPA from someone for it if you are on an earlier Kubuntu release). However, I find some seriously annoying bugs in it here, such as not being able to turn off the hourly "timeline" snapshots for some reason (I had to go and manually disable the service). I do use it on my second drive. The file browser is more rudimentary here, while in Timeshift you browse the snapshots in your default file manager (Dolphin) so you can drag files wherever you want instead of overwriting/replacing the current file(s).

I should move to using one tool for all my btrfs filesystems, but I am just not quite sold on btrfs-assistant.

But do note that nomal snapshots are not a good substitute for physical backups. I have been burned by this fact more often than I'd like to admit. Fillsystem corruption or hardware failures can make snapshots useless.