Hey! As a BTRFS user I was wondering Is it possible to provide a way to restore a snapper snapshot using the live environment provided by the ISO in GUI way (using Btrfsassistant or similar method) instead of with the Command line.(How to restore a Snapper root snapshot on an unbootable system) just like you could with the Linuxmint’s Timeshift.
Current solution I use
I currently use the Timeshift application to make and restore BTRFS snapshots, instead of using provided Btrfs-assistant Application. If my system failed to boot , I just boot an USB drive with Linux Mint live environment and mount the LUKS encrypted volume and go through the Timeshift GUI and restore the snapshot.
If it still fail to boot properly, it is because of the ESP ( mounted on /efiin my case) and the restored root file system have conflicts or mismatches because of a kernel update (running mkinitcpio when updating) .Since I have a hook to back up the ESP partition inside the btrfs snapshot using Rsync in such cases I use it restore files in the ESP.(maybe this will no longer needed to be manual BTRFS custom hooks by mwoz123 · Pull Request #381 · linuxmint/timeshift · GitHub )
Proposed options
This is not a hassle to me but for new Linux users it would be easy if the solution were to be provided by the the distro itself. It doesn’t even have to be a GUI program per say, it could be a TUI or like Arch Install script where you could navigate with your keyboard and choose your restore point. It could be included with live ISO or even in a smaller recovery image.If it is a TUI program/script It should have the ability to mount encrypted volumes and restore the backups within them Including the ESP (which could be backed up by a pacman hook. System backup - ArchWiki) Also It should not have the ability to delete any snapshots, maybe the ability restore as a read only one.
Misc
Somewhat similar but with systemdboot GitHub - openSUSE/sdbootutil
Thank you for your attention.