I’m using Limine and just trying to figure out the proper way to restore an older snapshot. I can’t find much documentation on this simple usage.
I see there is ‘Btrfs Assistant’ as well as limine-snapper-restore command. Do they do the same thing? The latter seems to be a shell script that calls some java command. I also notice the latter command doesn’t list all snapshots. Is there a way to?
Basically, what’s the right way to do a rollback to a certain snapshot?
Yeah, I did’t find a big manual either but the official page is Zesko / limine-snapper-sync · GitLab
limine-snapper-info helps me figure out if there are snapshots or if my boot’s out of space.
hello, I’m having the same issue did you figure out a way to do it? using btrfs assistant seems to restore the snapshot broke the OS (as I assume there was a mismatch with the kernel).
I also tried removing unnecessary backups to hopefully see the one I want in limine but it only removed the ones I deleted without showing the older ones (running limine-snapper-sync did not help either)
what unnecessary backups? You mean snapshots? You removed all of them in Snapper, so Limine removed them as well since it just follows Snapper. That’s what limine-snapper-sync does.
Snapshots are fully automatic when you run an update, you will see them appear in Limine menu.
I’m still a bit confued on this process. Let’s say I boot into an older snapshot listed in the Limine boot manager. Now I want to make that snapshot the default (i.e. make it the latest), and remove the ones after it. What is the correct process for that?
Btrfs Assistant, Snapper tab, Browse-Restore tab – select and restore; New/Delete tab – select and delete; reboot.
/etc/limine-snapper-sync.conf has:
### Max Snapshot Entries:
### Set the maximum number of snapshot entries for your OS. This depends on the boot partition size and how many kernels will be installed.
### Note: The tool uses a deduplication function to prevent copying kernel versions that already exist.
MAX_SNAPSHOT_ENTRIES=8
However snapper is keeping 50 snapshots (configured in /etc/snapper/configs/root). Am I right in that you cannot actually restore anything older than the 8th snapshot?
In fact the limine-snapshot-restore command only shows 8 snapshots to pick from. This is where it gets pretty confusing to me. It seems you can easily get a hosed system when not understanding how all of these moving pieces interact.
limine-snapper-info literally told me in yellow highlight “Snapshots: 8 / 8”, so I was not confused the limit was kinda obvious.I have never restored anything older than the 8th snapshot anyway, lol
Did you miss what I mentioned above?
/etc/snapper/configs/root has:
NUMBER_LIMIT="50"
This is definitely confusing to me. What is the point of keeping 50 snapshots when 8 (also nowhere mentioned in this file) is what you can safely use?
Hi,
did you end up finding a way to restore the old snapshots in the boot-list?
I’m having the same problem and found no solution, I started a new topic about it: Limine: How to display older snapshots again, after newer ones have been deleted?
Dennis
No. In my opinion the infrastructure around limine snapshots is a big mess. It generally works most of the time for simple restores, but if you are trying to debug anything it’s difficult to figure out what is going on with the number of configs, scripts, and binaries involved. It’s a bunch of Java (why) tools and shell scripts which can easily get out of sync with system snapshots due to the the limited size of the /boot partition. That’s the whole reason there is a limit of 8 there.
Sorry, I love CachyOS but this is one area I really hate.
Yes, you can still restore an older snapshot even if it is not present in the list when needed. That is similar to using systemd-boot without snapshot integration.