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Did you take a snapshot before performing the upgrade, and did you try to restore the previous snapshot before the reinstall? Curious if snapshots can protect

Did you take a snapshot before performing the upgrade, and did you try to restore the previous snapshot before the reinstall? Curious if snapshots can protect you even as far as OS upgrades gone wrong. I'd assume they can, if all filesystems are ZFS + snapshotted.

ohthehugemanate 7y ago
I've used (conceptually equivalent) btrfs snapshots to let me install arch and gentoo, always easily rolling back to my own heavily customized Ubuntu system. I've never tried it, but given a copy of the snapshot tools, you should even be able to rollback from formatting your root partition.
- pm7 7y ago
  I think there are even some tools to do this directly in GRUB, at least for btrfs. We can have automatically created list of available snapshots.
kop316 7y ago
To be honest I didn't feel like tinkering with it, I just reinstalled. Right now it is on ext4. My issue was that for some reason Linux no longer could find the encrypted partition to decrypt, so I couldn't get it up to a point where I could even work with it.
- oarsinsync 7y ago
  Ah that's a shame. If you'd had a bootable USB stick or some pre-boot environment to use, you probably could have rolled back from a snapshot. At least, that's my understanding of the theory. Your experience has definitely not discouraged me from wanting to ZFS my root partitions though. If only to provide the potential / theoretical ability to roll back a snapshot if necessary!
  - kop316 7y ago
    To be honest, it was laziness on my part, I could have probably figured it out and fixed it. The snapshot ability was incredibly nice, don't get me wrong. I really liked it on my system. I may switch back in the near future. I can post my "script" when I get home if you want to try it. I use script very liberally, it was my notes of the commands I used in order in order to get ZFS/dmcrypt working.

ohthehugemanate 7y ago

I've used (conceptually equivalent) btrfs snapshots to let me install arch and gentoo, always easily rolling back to my own heavily customized Ubuntu system. I've never tried it, but given a copy of the snapshot tools, you should even be able to rollback from formatting your root partition.

pm7 7y ago
I think there are even some tools to do this directly in GRUB, at least for btrfs. We can have automatically created list of available snapshots.

kop316 7y ago

To be honest I didn't feel like tinkering with it, I just reinstalled. Right now it is on ext4. My issue was that for some reason Linux no longer could find the encrypted partition to decrypt, so I couldn't get it up to a point where I could even work with it.

oarsinsync 7y ago
Ah that's a shame. If you'd had a bootable USB stick or some pre-boot environment to use, you probably could have rolled back from a snapshot. At least, that's my understanding of the theory. Your experience has definitely not discouraged me from wanting to ZFS my root partitions though. If only to provide the potential / theoretical ability to roll back a snapshot if necessary!
- kop316 7y ago
  To be honest, it was laziness on my part, I could have probably figured it out and fixed it. The snapshot ability was incredibly nice, don't get me wrong. I really liked it on my system. I may switch back in the near future. I can post my "script" when I get home if you want to try it. I use script very liberally, it was my notes of the commands I used in order in order to get ZFS/dmcrypt working.