4 ms·

This is great, I've often wondered why so little focus is spent on tools like this. Feels like low hanging fruit given the great usability improvements they can

by tjoff 5y ago

This is great, I've often wondered why so little focus is spent on tools like this. Feels like low hanging fruit given the great usability improvements they can bring. All the talks about backups but the reason people don't do it is partly because the tooling is so bad. (no, snapshots is not a proper backup by itself, but a great addition to). Wondering if btrfs will get some love too.

atoav 5y ago
There is timeshift for btrfs. Sadly it only works for certain very standard btrfs subvolume layouts and if you deviate only slightly from that it is no longer supported..
- vondur 5y ago
  Yes. I watched a tutorial video on YouTube where it shows how to label the BTRFS sub volumes correctly for Timeshift to work correctly in Fedora.
- ravi-delia 5y ago
  It's not super hard to hack it if you need to, but yeah zfs exposes exactly what's needed without any global configuration. In exchange btrfs gets to be a little more flexible, but honestly idk how useful it is to treat snapshots as normal directories anyway. That's my only real complaint about btrfs on the desktop.
Affric 5y ago
My theory based on reading comments from ZFS devs is that as resources are somewhat limited and most people who use it are a bit technical these kind of things are low priority so they go slowly.
mustache_kimono 5y ago
> This is great, Thanks! (It's my little project.) > I've often wondered why so little focus is spent on tools like this. Feels like low hanging fruit given the great usability improvements they can bring. 100% agree. Definitely a QoL tool for the ZFS lover. The zsh key bindings open up uses I never really even dreamed up, because it's just so quick to get to a usable interface. Definitely also a very UNIX-y tool too. Recently I started fiddling with piping to git repos and tar archives and it's very cool -- see: https://github.com/kimono-koans/httm#example-usage https://github.com/kimono-koans/httm#example-usage > Wondering if btrfs will get some love too. btrfs makes this exact thing harder, but, cross fingers, the btrfs devs are listening, because I think btrfs folks would love a ".btrfs" directory like the ".zfs" directory.
- ravi-delia 5y ago
  I at least, and I suspect a lot of desktop btrfs users, keep all my snapshots in a specific "folder" I keep mounted in ./.snapshots. It's sort of a hack, but so long as the file structure stays mostly the same it shouldn't be too difficult to whip up something like this for btrfs. Definitely not as good, but hey, it's btrfs! If I wanted good I'd be on zfs anyway (I kid, I kid)
  - mustache_kimono 5y ago
    I'm keeping my eye on it. Definitely less appealing when I can't make it work in all use cases. If you wanted to file an issue and you could perhaps explain (I need your expertise!) how to parse the correct sub volume mount points from `mount` or `btrfs` or whatever command to make this work consistently for all cases, I'd jump right on it.
    - ravi-delia 5y ago
      It would surprise me very much if there was a way to automatically grab the necessary info. I'll try and whip something up which just takes user config, but I doubt it'll be good enough for general consumption (or if good enough for general consumption is possible on btrfs). Like I said lol, a hack of the crudest order
seqizz 5y ago
I'm using snapper (https://github.com/openSUSE/snapper https://github.com/openSUSE/snapper) as a daemon which snapshots periodically and it's easy to search files with some fzf-like fuzzy-searching shell tools. But now checking its explanation, I must say it doesn't look polished.

by tjoff 5y ago

atoav 5y ago

There is timeshift for btrfs. Sadly it only works for certain very standard btrfs subvolume layouts and if you deviate only slightly from that it is no longer supported..

vondur 5y ago
Yes. I watched a tutorial video on YouTube where it shows how to label the BTRFS sub volumes correctly for Timeshift to work correctly in Fedora.
ravi-delia 5y ago
It's not super hard to hack it if you need to, but yeah zfs exposes exactly what's needed without any global configuration. In exchange btrfs gets to be a little more flexible, but honestly idk how useful it is to treat snapshots as normal directories anyway. That's my only real complaint about btrfs on the desktop.

Affric 5y ago

My theory based on reading comments from ZFS devs is that as resources are somewhat limited and most people who use it are a bit technical these kind of things are low priority so they go slowly.

mustache_kimono 5y ago

> This is great, Thanks! (It's my little project.) > I've often wondered why so little focus is spent on tools like this. Feels like low hanging fruit given the great usability improvements they can bring. 100% agree. Definitely a QoL tool for the ZFS lover. The zsh key bindings open up uses I never really even dreamed up, because it's just so quick to get to a usable interface. Definitely also a very UNIX-y tool too. Recently I started fiddling with piping to git repos and tar archives and it's very cool -- see: https://github.com/kimono-koans/httm#example-usage https://github.com/kimono-koans/httm#example-usage > Wondering if btrfs will get some love too. btrfs makes this exact thing harder, but, cross fingers, the btrfs devs are listening, because I think btrfs folks would love a ".btrfs" directory like the ".zfs" directory.

ravi-delia 5y ago
I at least, and I suspect a lot of desktop btrfs users, keep all my snapshots in a specific "folder" I keep mounted in ./.snapshots. It's sort of a hack, but so long as the file structure stays mostly the same it shouldn't be too difficult to whip up something like this for btrfs. Definitely not as good, but hey, it's btrfs! If I wanted good I'd be on zfs anyway (I kid, I kid)
- mustache_kimono 5y ago
  I'm keeping my eye on it. Definitely less appealing when I can't make it work in all use cases. If you wanted to file an issue and you could perhaps explain (I need your expertise!) how to parse the correct sub volume mount points from `mount` or `btrfs` or whatever command to make this work consistently for all cases, I'd jump right on it.
  - ravi-delia 5y ago
    It would surprise me very much if there was a way to automatically grab the necessary info. I'll try and whip something up which just takes user config, but I doubt it'll be good enough for general consumption (or if good enough for general consumption is possible on btrfs). Like I said lol, a hack of the crudest order

seqizz 5y ago

I'm using snapper (https://github.com/openSUSE/snapper https://github.com/openSUSE/snapper) as a daemon which snapshots periodically and it's easy to search files with some fzf-like fuzzy-searching shell tools. But now checking its explanation, I must say it doesn't look polished.