4 ms·

How often are people reevaluating their file system choice? As excited as Linux users tend to be about the little things, the file system is so close to being u

How often are people reevaluating their file system choice? As excited as Linux users tend to be about the little things, the file system is so close to being unnoticeable day-to-day that it’s not worth the hassle when the current one works perfectly fine.

rhn_mk1 4y ago
It's unnoticeable when you don't reevaluate your choices. Once you get into the habit of automatic snapshots, ext4's lack of snapshotting is very noticeable.
- MacsHeadroom 4y ago
  I'm not GP, but I'm curious. What am I missing out on? When would I benefit from having a snapshot on say my laptop?
  - nubinetwork 4y ago
    Rolling back or cloning the snapshot lets you get back deleted files, or reverting a bad update or config change... The snapshot is also a point in time to derive backups from, and usually costs nothing to make, as opposed to making a dd image of the disk, or tarballing everything, etc. Whether you think you need those is debatable, but it's quick and easy enough, works for me.
  - rhn_mk1 4y ago
    One thing the sibling did not mention is you can use btrfs send/receive to create dead easy, fast, and simple to restore incremental backups.
  - _piif 4y ago
    I've lost track of the amount of times I accidentally deleted a file I shouldn't have or messed up a git project in a way it'd have taken ages to untangle, said oops, remembered I have hourly snapper snapshots set up and just copied the previous state over. It's been a massive time- and occasionally lifesaver for me.
    - graypegg 4y ago
      You know, that's very convincing actually! I'm obviously missing out, I'll need to mess around with it more.
      - _piif 4y ago
        If you decide to dive into it depending on your filesystem of choice I can recommend either Sanoid [0] and httm [1] for ZFS or Snapper [2] for BTRFS as automatic snapshot solutions. Good luck with your endeavors! [0] https://github.com/jimsalterjrs/sanoid https://github.com/jimsalterjrs/sanoid [1] https://github.com/kimono-koans/httm https://github.com/kimono-koans/httm [2] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Snapper https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Snapper

rhn_mk1 4y ago

It's unnoticeable when you don't reevaluate your choices. Once you get into the habit of automatic snapshots, ext4's lack of snapshotting is very noticeable.

MacsHeadroom 4y ago
I'm not GP, but I'm curious. What am I missing out on? When would I benefit from having a snapshot on say my laptop?
- nubinetwork 4y ago
  Rolling back or cloning the snapshot lets you get back deleted files, or reverting a bad update or config change... The snapshot is also a point in time to derive backups from, and usually costs nothing to make, as opposed to making a dd image of the disk, or tarballing everything, etc. Whether you think you need those is debatable, but it's quick and easy enough, works for me.
- rhn_mk1 4y ago
  One thing the sibling did not mention is you can use btrfs send/receive to create dead easy, fast, and simple to restore incremental backups.
- _piif 4y ago
  I've lost track of the amount of times I accidentally deleted a file I shouldn't have or messed up a git project in a way it'd have taken ages to untangle, said oops, remembered I have hourly snapper snapshots set up and just copied the previous state over. It's been a massive time- and occasionally lifesaver for me.
  - graypegg 4y ago
    You know, that's very convincing actually! I'm obviously missing out, I'll need to mess around with it more.
    - _piif 4y ago
      If you decide to dive into it depending on your filesystem of choice I can recommend either Sanoid [0] and httm [1] for ZFS or Snapper [2] for BTRFS as automatic snapshot solutions. Good luck with your endeavors! [0] https://github.com/jimsalterjrs/sanoid https://github.com/jimsalterjrs/sanoid [1] https://github.com/kimono-koans/httm https://github.com/kimono-koans/httm [2] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Snapper https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Snapper