I want to switch my current distro to it's testing branch, but before I do that I would like to back up all of my programs in case something goes terribly wrong. How can I set up a subvolume to contain program files that I can restore if something goes haywire? I've looked things up but I'm not entirely sure what the course of action is, sorry
#How can I use btrfs to make snapshots for my applications?
humble canopy
aka basically just make a subvolume for /bin (or /) but I don't know how to do that after the fact
frail gazelle
$ btrfs subvolume snapshot --help
cd to wherever you want the new subvol to be; if your / is a subvolume (not the root one) then you may want to mount the root subvol and cd to it.
sudo btfrs snapshot create <the subvolume to snapshot> <name of the snapshot> (or whatever you wanna name it)
humble canopy
what if I don't really understand how to use subvolumes
to me they look like virtual partitions but I don't know how to replace old stuff on my computer with subvolumes
frail gazelle
basically a subvolume is like a directory that you can mount as if it were a partition
what you want to do is create a new subvolume, and copy the contents of /bin to it
then you can mount it to /bin in /etc/fstab
if you create a subvolume under one that is already mounted, then you can cd into it like any other directory
my main disk looks like this:
ID 256 gen 104813 top level 5 path @
ID 257 gen 102113 top level 5 path @boot
ID 261 gen 104813 top level 5 path @home
ID 262 gen 47790 top level 5 path .beeshome
ID 263 gen 47618 top level 5 path @boot_snapshot_2022-08-13
so i have 5 subvolumes
you would do something like
cd /
sudo btrfs subvolume create @bin_backup_date
then copy the contents of /bin to /@bin
If your / is already on its own subvolume (you can check with sudo btrfs subvol list /), then you can just use the snapshot command i posted
final edge
what you want to do is create a new subvolume, and copy the contents of `/bin` t...
you cant mount to /bin it's a symlink to /usr/bin
a subvol of /usr/bin is also a bad idea
even for a /usr
cys if you restore a snapshot of root and dont restore /usr
then they dont match
if you want to downgrade an app install an older version of the package @humble canopy