Dropping home sub and using only root sub

[GreyGeek]

About a week ago I decided that I was tired of taking @ and @home snapshots in pairs.
Why pairs? Because some apps install files in both root and /home and snapshotting @ without snapshotting the corresponding @home can result in a restoration with broken applications.

I devised one method and Oshunluver devised another. They are given in another post.

The result? Excellent. As expected, one snapshot of @ archived to a remote storage device takes only one snapshot command and only one "send -p" command, and is very quick. Rolling back is a snap as well.

The Documents, Downloads, Pictures and Videos folders are ones that can be moved to a @data subvolume and mounted under /home/acct/Data in fstab. Data can be snapshotted and backed up separately and on a different time schedule than @. I tried that and it works nicely, but my data requirements aren't as great as many of yours so I decided to revert.

I also found that while one may instruct TimeShift to remove all of its snapshots it will remove them from its GUI but not from your system. It also binds @ and your other snapshots to its folder, resulting in forcing you to delete TimeShift's debris and finally delete @ from the TimeShift folder, crashing your system. One has to boot a LiveUSB and restore @ from an archival backup.

I didn't see any point in running Snapper since I can do anything it does from the CLI without saving snapshots under /.

So, from now on, I am going to install only @ when I install the next LTS of Kubuntu.

[mr_raider]

Do you have any choice in choosing what subvolumes are configured on install?

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[oshunluvr]

Do you have any choice in choosing what subvolumes are configured on install?

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No, you don't, but it's pretty trivial to convert if you do it immediately after installation. Simply:

1. Don't log into the GUI after first boot, log into the terminal mode.
2. Unmount @home.
3. Mount the root file system somewhere.
4. Copy the user folder(s) from @home to /home.
5. Log out of the terminal and into the GUI.
6. Edit /etc/fstab and remove (or remark) the @home mount line.
7. Delete the @home subvolume.

One of the main reasons to do this IMO is some people multi-boot and want access to their data but have separate home folders for settings and other things like that. The other is like GG suggests - you don't need to backup your personal data on the same schedule as your root subvolume so by not having your user settings and configs separate from your @ then rollbacks and backups are more complete and in a single subvolume.

[oshunluvr]

So GG, did you consider another alternative? Rather than mounting the data subvolume under /home/user/Data - thus adding an additional layer and non-standard setup to your normal user folders, you could just mount the root filesystem and then replace the data folders with links to @data. Example: /home/user/Videos becomes a link to /subvols/@data/user/Videos. One might want to mount the root file system anyway for rollback purposes so it wouldn't be any additional mounts. Just a thought. Probably have more application on a multiuser system than a single.

[GreyGeek]

Ya, I thought about those approaches. However, I don't have a file server or keep a collection of movies or other large files, i.e., my data requirements are not in the TB range. My entire system is currently 89 GB and my home account is 69GB, and that includes my wife's family tree data, an archive of the source code of my various coding projects from 1980 on, several programming IDE's and a collection of odds and ends files. My latest coding tools are the Arduino IDE and XOD, which I added this week in anticipation of helping a friend of 30 years to move his IQAN PLC code to Arduino micro controllers.


Doing a daily incremental backup takes about 10-15 seconds, which is alright by me!