Hi, I planning to upgrade my fedora 41 to 42, I previously had a smooth experience with 40 to 41 and this time some one suggested using btrfs-assistant, a snapper gui, to take snapshots in-case any thing goes wrong
But I’m having a problem in understanding the concept of a snapshot from the arch wiki, how is it any different from full system copy and also in understanding the TIMELINE_LIMIT_DAILY=“10”, like what does it mean, does snapper take a snapshot hourly or what
And the most important is, how can I use it in the upgrade process, like do i need to take a snapshot before and after upgrade? and if anything goes wrong how can i retrieve my system?
To use it in the upgrade process you would take a snapshot (backup) and then do the upgrade. If the upgrade did not work, you would then restore to the previous state - how you do that if your system is broken though… I do not know
Using BTRFS snapshots as backup solution needs additional steps, as opposed to just creating the snapshots, since those need to be stored on a different BTRFS file system. This Fedora Magazine article explains the use of snapshots, including for backup purposes. While BTRFS Assistant presents an easier-to-use GUI, the article’s CLI commands provide a better understanding of the underlying technology.
For system upgrades there’s still the old way of creating backups, either backing up the /home folder (and maybe /etc) only, or creating disk images of the entire /boot, /boot/efi and root/home partitions[1].
This step needs a spare drive with enough free space though, and maybe the backup process left running overnight. ↩︎
