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Filesystem snapshots should make any upgrades almost painless. If it failed, roll back to a pre-update snapshot and in the meanwhile inspect changes from a post

Filesystem snapshots should make any upgrades almost painless. If it failed, roll back to a pre-update snapshot and in the meanwhile inspect changes from a post-upgrade version (branch) of the filesystem. Maybe even run this version in a VM. Sad things are: 1) almost no FS supports writeable snapshots and LVM snapshotting is far from being convenient; 2) you have to setup everything by hand.

nieve 13y ago
Do you know of any installer-time options for linux other than btrfs? I don't know of any fs choices, but openSUSE supports btrfs out of the box and even integrates it with the package manager to allow rollbacks. It's pretty convenient and as far as I know you can simply mount an old snapshot (writeable!) and use standard Unix tools to compare them. I'm not sure if that's everything you want, though - a tool that could actually tell you what's changed using the internal snapshot information would probably be much faster and superior to a diff or rsync dry run listing. It's still closer than anything I've ever seen and the ability to simply switch which subvolume (snapshots are just subvolumes) is the default or mount it within an extant fs tree is a win for me.