How to properly manage btrfs limine snapshots on cachyos?

FAQ and Tutorials
1

Hi everyone, I’m a newbie to cachyos and I currently have cachyos kernel 6.17 cachyos gnome 49 wayland + limine + btrfs + zsh. I would like to know what you would suggest to do (number of minimums to keep; should we also save the snapshots on an external drive or not, the things to learn about snapshots and the learning curve in your experience, the pitfalls to avoid, and any other useful tips you can think of) in order to properly manage my machine.

2

i didn’t use limine, but as for the snapshot and the restore procedure, from my experiences and shallow knowledge

  1. snapshot in brtfs can’t be moved to external drive (from my knowing)
  2. do prepare live cd, in case something break whenever you go back to older snapshot, so you can always do cachy-chroot via live cd
  3. some configuration is still persist even you rollback (atleast on my end with default snapper configuration) so with cachy-chroot, i always do rebuilt the initramfs and rebuild the bootloader (systemd)
  4. for me, i always limit several number, and enable other snapshot too, here is my current config for my snapper

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3

snapshot in brtfs can’t be moved to external drive (from my knowing)

That is not true. You can easily backup snapshots to another drive using btrfs send and receive and there is a tool called snbkthat automates that for you: https://snapper.io/2024/11/11/snbk.html

The rest is correct. btrfs-assistant is a very nice tool that I actually miss on other distros. This is my config:

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4

Hi, thank you for your response.

5

Hello, thank you very much for your help. You talk about a tool called snbk that automates the backup snapshots to another drive. In case of an external drive that is not always plug into the machine, how will it proceed ? will it be an issue in your experience ? Thanks again for your help.

6

Sorry, I don’t have experience with that, because my backup drive is internally built into my PC. Also I am really not sure whether the backed up snapshots will really work, because I never needed them yet :crossed_fingers:

8

Hi, thank you for your response. If the case appears where you used the backup snapshots please provide a feedback here. It will help a lot. Enjoy the rest of your day.