I want to do a backup before I upgrade, per the recommendation, in case something goes wrong and I have to revert but I don’t know the recommended tool for creating a backup/restore point in Fedora. I’m used to Timeshift in Mint but it’s not in Discover.
Hi, Timeshift is available in the Fedora repositories. However, to use Btrfs snapshots, you need to modify the subvolumes to @ and @home during installation. In your case, you can use Timeshift in rsync mode for backup.
I would go for Btrfs Assistant. Once open, head over to the Snapper Settings tab, create a new config with backup path /, enter anything as the name, click Save. Then go to the Snapper tab and click New. It will instantly create a snapshot, and you’re done. You could also make a snapshot of your personal files this way, using a new config with backup path /home (this is not a replacement for a proper backup to an external drive!).
You won’t need any extra space for the snapshots, it just “freezes” the files that are already there. Any changes from now on will be stored in a different part of the disk. If you upgrade successfully and are running out of space later on, you can delete the snapshot to free up some space.
Note that this app has a weird bug that prevents you from opening Flatpak apps after you open it, until you logout and back in.
I can recommend borg backup (cli). If you prefer using a GUI check out Pika Backup (GTK) or Vorta (QT) both use borg under the hood.
It is extremely space efficient (dedup & compression) but you cannot look at older files on the file system like you can do with snapshots or rsync. But there is a nice mounting option if you want to browse files in your backups.
And of course you can backup locally or remotely (with encryption if you want).
For many use cases, upgrades are more I/O intensive than normal usage, so can push a storage device that is close to failure over the edge. For that reason I rely on backups to external storage when upgrading. I don’t backup the system files, just keep notes of configuration changes (mostly edits to files in /etc) and a list of installed packages so if there is a problem with storage media I can do a fresh install, add my local changes, and then restore user data. For day-to-day backups of user files I use a dedicated backup tool (currently Pika), but for upgrades I just copy user directories to an external drive in case the upgrade cause problems for my backup tool.