Recommendation for backup/snapshotting on Silverblue

Ask Fedora
1

I understand that ideally, the system should be rebuilt from a Containerfile (at least that’s supposed to be normal/desirable in the future). User data is then left to some other application of the user’s choice.

I’m taking one thing at a time and recently moved to Silverblue.
There’s Timeshift and DejaDup for snapshotting & backup.

Say I want to backup everything, but preferably customized stuff, and system stuff separately.
I found a symlink mapping somewhere that I’m not able to find again… it sez things like ~ actually goes to /var/home/<user>/.
Is there a definitive list of these, in the context of Silverblue, so I can let Timeshift handle the system, and I backup customizations etc. with DejaDup?

Thanks in advance.

2

Is it that what you are looking for?

3

This looks like it, thank you.

So when backing up customizations, would these be sufficient?

  • /home → /var/home
  • /root → /var/roothome
  • /usr/local → /var/usrlocal

leaving

  • /opt → /var/opt
  • /mnt→ /var/mnt
  • /tmp → /sysroot/tmp

My /srv → /var/srv is empty, I don’t know what goes there.

4

So… does it make sense to use Timeshift in Silverblue?
Timeshift says unsupported subvolume layout (asks for one starting with @).
What I have is:

 fdra  ~  sudo btrfs subvolume list .
[sudo] password for fdra: 
ID 256 gen 3211 top level 5 path var
ID 257 gen 3211 top level 5 path home
ID 258 gen 3211 top level 5 path root

Should I stick to Deja Dup for user data backup, and let rpm-ostree be responsible for rollbacks?

5

I’ve been using DejaDup at the office for backup and basically just backup /var/home/<user>, with some exclusions like ~/.local/share (container storage under there) and ~/.var/ (flatpak storage).

I think the paths you identified will generate a very good backup of your user data…and now that I think of it, backing up /etc might be a good idea, too.