[Discussion] On a workstation who uses (btrfs) snapshots and how usefull are these

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on (data) server—NAS or otherwise— I can see snapshots make sense on a workstation all relevant stuff is either

  • synced with some sort of cloud offering versioning of some sort
  • synced with source control of some sort.

In either case restoring accidental changes/removes from a snapshot probably more of a hassle than just going online and rollback a change.

Who is using (btrfs) snapshots on their workstation?

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I find snapshots to be super useful on workstations. In fact, far more useful then on servers.

Things I find useful with snapshots:

  • Accidentally delete a file, grab it from the most recent hourly snapshot(or an older one if you prefer)
  • Compare versions of files to understand what changed when something breaks
  • If I a screw up configuration in a VM, and I don’t have a VM snapshot, I can just restore the VM disk from a snapshot
  • Restore a corrupted document, sometimes from a long time ago.

I don’t think everyone has all their personal files cloud synced or in source control. Even if you did, you generally have more fine grained control of retention with local snapshots. For example, the snapshots of my documents subvolume has very long retention. Cloud storage would probably only save some fixed number of old versions. It isn’t uncommon for me to grab a version of a document from 6-9 months prior.

There also GUI tools to make restoring files from snapshots very simple.

All that being said, if you keep all your files in cloud storage and you have a decent amount of retention that could certainly be a viable alternative for many people. That would never work for me though.