OpenSuSE filesystem snapshots on btrfs
Posted on Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 17:16 by Hubertus A. Haniel
Only recently did I find out about a new cool feature on the OpenSuSE Factory builds called snapper. It has been in the works for quite a while and was actually announced back in April here but it is only recently that I have tried these tools out while familiarising myself with btrfs
Snapper is reasonably easy to configure and there are quite a few guides on the OpenSuSE website. Once it is all configured it creates snapshots of your system on regular intervals via cron and also everytime you make modifications to your system using zypper and YaST but it requires that your root filesystem is btrfs. - The only drawback currently is that you can not boot of btrfs so you can not create snapshots of the /boot filesystem and therfore you would not be able to roll back kernel updates unless you replicate the contents of /boot into your btrfs filesystem before kernel upgrades.
A detailed guide on how to get snapper going which I followed is here but it should be noted that the subvolume for snapshots should be created as /.snapshots rather then /snapshots otherwise things will just not work.
So on your btrfs root filesystem or any filesystem that you want to snapshot you create a subvolume called .snapshots like so:
btrfs subvolume create /.snapshots
Then you create your configuration in /etc/snapper/configs/root for your root filesystem. - I got the example out of /etc/snapper/config-templates/default
Then you add "root" to SNAPPER_CONFIGS in /etc/sysconfig/snapper
Now everything should be ready to work and you can try to create an initial snapshot with the following command:
snapper create --description "initial"Edited on: Sat, Sep 24, 2011 17:41
Posted in HowTo (RSS), System - Linux (RSS)
