A short how-to with screenshots, for people new to Fedora and those who are familiar with ext4 and TimeShift, showing an easy way to boot up off a USB live ISO and return back to a previous point in time.
Article Description:
There are a lot of articles from the BTRFS emergence era of 2022/23 extolling its virtues of easy rollback, stability and so forth. And most of the guides have paragraphs of command line instructions to help your understanding too.
Thankfully, a lot has changed during 2026 and in the intervening years the BTRFS infrastructure has matured as well.
Although my experience with Linux goes back quite a few years, I have only been using Fedora on an off for a couple. Mainly as test-bed virtual machines but also on a secondary use laptop with Kinoite as an immutable.
Recently, one of the biggest reasons that stopped me switching to Fedora as a daily driver was not being able to find information on how to recover from system boot failure on BTRFS.
This all changed a few months ago, when I finally worked out the missing pieces of this information puzzle and found an easy to follow method that works just as simply on BTRFS as does the one using ext4 and TimeShift.
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Thanks for volunteering to write for the Fedora Magazine!
@alex-genovese Don’t forget to let the editors know when you feel your article is complete and ready for us to review it. Just leave a note in this topic with the WP link to the preview.
@alex-genovese I’ve reviewed the article and it looks pretty good. I set links to open in a new tab and in the case of images they will now open enlarged for readability . I did make a few very minor word changes to help the language “flow” more easily. No substantial changes that would change your content.
I will plan on publishing on 7 Sept 0800 UTC unless I hear from you in time to publish on 4 Sept. (we publish typically on Monday, Wednesday, or Friday).
@rlengland Thank you for the little tweaks and the approval.
I managed to spot a missing word on my repeat re-read:
I have edited and saved that using the normal save procedure. Hopefully that is the right way to do it?
In the Partition Sizes section, " have to fully decompressed" > " have to be fully decompressed".
I also took out a repeated “too” in the Alternative Layouts bit > “Fedora Linux will happily install alongside your current setup if you want to try things out too.”
I was in two minds about using this originally and have just noticed that there is another “too” finish a few lines up.