Hi there everyone,
I have an Intel N100 mini PC with 16GB of RAM and I’d like to use it as a small and simple home PC.
I will mostly use Samba to share folders and do extremely simple backups.
Beside backups, I was wondering if I could introduce snapshots in any way. I have a small experience with openSUSE, but Tumbleweed rolls just too fast and Leap is a bit behind and is giving me issues with Wi-Fi that I can’t troubleshoot.
Ubuntu in fact is simply working good even with 24.04 LTS.
However the Btrfs snapshots that suse uses are very handy when in danger. Is there something similar I can achieve with Ubuntu? Be it with Btrfs or - if you have any very simple guide I can follow - LVM + any file system, or any app or alternative to quickly restore a situation.
Thank you in advance.
I have no experience with Btrfs and its’ snapshots, as I am using ZFS since more than a decade.
I praise Ubuntu for including ZFS in the standard distro, so no need to use external repo, no issues related with such.
ZFS offers not only snapshots.
Boot environments are very convenient, too. (Though not yet easy to get up and running on Linux)
Unfortunately, I would need to search for introductory stuff on ZFS. You’ll find what you like when you google.
Generally the Oracle documentation is wonderful, absolute recommended.
Edit: see also man zfs, zpool, zdb, …
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Okay, this is interesting.
If I choose to use ZFS automatically and Ubuntu at least tries to setup the minimum (like installing the right packages and, I don’t know, maybe creating the correct subvolumes if these are common with ZFS), I can definitely test it.
Do you think this can be a starting point? → Using ZFS Snapshots and Clones | Ubuntu
I’ll also try to check for Cockpit and see how it works, since it might also have GUI plugins for ZFS.
Umm… regarding the article, imho the guy should have also mentioned that you can make recursive snapshots, what is what people normally want…
I’d consider for example this Ars Technica article a better starting point, to get an idea what ZFS is, how it works, what makes it so powerful. And then go on to more practical guides for the particular tasks.