Edit: I’m sorry, I referenced ITSFOSS article when I should have said the official TS documentation on github says you can restore a snapshot from LM to Fedora, or whatever. So it still should work.
I will see what else I can find.
Sheila
Edit: I’m sorry, I referenced ITSFOSS article when I should have said the official TS documentation on github says you can restore a snapshot from LM to Fedora, or whatever. So it still should work.
I will see what else I can find.
Sheila
Here is some key info from the github source:
/etc/timeshift/restore-hooks.d
. Note: the script(s) will be run from the restored filesystem.After this episode, I will need to know if I should continue rsync with Timeshift. I just don’t know anything about BTRFS, but it seems to be faster and save disk space. I will also need to further look into automating something like CZ if it is possible.
Had fully planned to test run whatever method I intend to use on home server and test restoring just so we do not run into these issues in the future.
Thanks,
Sheila
Now I am going to have to test a few other items. I have installed many Linux distros over time and from my Ventoy, but today has been crazy slow. I am still waiting on a simple LM fresh install and it is only 1/6 of the way through copying files and it has been 10 min. That is with wiping partition and installing on entire disk.
USB drive? Flash drive? SSD? I don’t know where to begin.
Sheila
I still say, start with an empty filesystem.
TS should be able to restore everything.
or
Do an install , then rebuild everything you need by hand.
You mean a fresh install like I am doing now? Or from live session? It worked when I restored the Nov 23 snapshot on working LM. I am going to try just laying the latest snapshot on and see what happens.
That will be my next option, and only rebuild from Oct/Nov, which is still a lot.
Thanks,
Sheila
I mean no install at all… just an empty filesystem
Found this
Rsync snapshots cannot be moved easily. If you try to move them manually, the shared files will get duplicated and use up a lot of space on the destination.
You can move them manually with following command, but its not recommended:
sudo rsync -avhL snapshots/ newlocation/
So if you move them, the hard links will get expanded and use
huge amounts of space… but they should still work!
I haven’t moved the ones I am using now, only that one from Oct 26. I am only letting TS find the ones it backed up and restore them
I will try from live cd after wiping drive of everything. Maybe that will ensure nothing residual.
Thanks so much
Sheila
I have been reading.
Everyone says TS is for reversing a system to a previous state, not for restoring a totally lost system
but
It has the original full image, and it may be possible to wind forward from that to a given snapshot… what I suggest will test it.
By putting in a new install, you are giving TS something to wind back from… that may be necessary… it may not be able to wind back from nothing. … we shall see, it is worth a try.
I agree. Am going to try from fresh install while I have it. Then if that fails, will wipe hard drive and try to restore then.
Will update when it gets finished with round 1.
Sheila
Well nevermind fresh install. I came back upstairs after an hour and install showed as not progressed since I left. Rebooting now will probably need to gparted and wipe drive. I am gonna put the Ventoy in a different drive as well.
Sheila
While I am thinking about it, the other day when I started gparted, it would never load the GUI. I finally had to choose the 3rd or 4th option with large text to vram or something. After choosing option 1, I get the background and options but once it tries to start, it hangs at the warranty line till I have to reboot.
It does speedily send a lot of rows about nvidia and iwlwifi right before it hangs. just want to be sure this is not a hardware issue.
Sheila
Well, wiping the entire drive and restoring from a B,H snapshot from yesterday morning left me with an unbootable drive
Reboot and Select proper Boot device
or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key
In BIOS, there is only the SSD internal drive and the external HDD and nothing says Ubuntu.
So I am guessing after watching for 20 min how it created everything (nothing to delete) and now it has nothing bootable on it–this does not work.
I am going to boot into Testdisk and see if there is anything on the drive and if so, once again format and attempt the original snapshot from Nov.
Will update later.
Sheila
Looking at the internal SSD, I see why it failed. Unlike when installing an OS, TS does not create a boot partition if one is not already there. Since I did not create one, even though the boot was included in the snapshot, it did not create one. You’d think you would have gotten some type of message on this, but I did not.
I thought you could make a boot/efi parition in gparted, but after creating the Linux partition, leaving 512 mb at the start of disk for boot, I can only create a fat32 partition but options remain primary logical or extended. So I have to do this in CLI. And what about swap? Do I need to also create that since I obviously need everything like it was before in order for TS to restore correctly? Can’t remember, but swap size=RAM size?
Sheila
OK, i did not know that
That is strange.
You must have an msdos partition table.
I thought you had gpt partition table
You may have done that by accident. Gparted makes an msdos partition table by default.
Can you check?
That might be why it would not let you make an efi system partition.
It might also be upsetting TS
I didn’t make a partition table in gparted. I deleted everything and formatted one entire drive as ext4. Did GP do that ?
Sheila
Let me rephrase:
Before doing the restore, I deleted both partitions and formatted the entire drive as ext4.
After it failed, I saw about 75 gb used of the drive, which means TS put something on there. But saw no boot/efi partition and knew that was the issue.
Now I deleted all that and was going to make another attempt by making a boot/efi myself. Did not know you couldn’t do that part in GP.
Sheila
@Sheila_Flanagan
You can use gparted to make any partition but the mount points have to be set from the OS installer, if not then nothing works.
You can make an EFI system partition with gparted.
About 512Mb and format it to fat32
but Gparted will not write and boot files (ie grub) in that partition. You need to use an installer or a live distro to write
grub in there.
It doesnt matter whether the partition table is msdos or gpt, the disk can still contain an EFI partition, as long as there is room.
If you did not specify when you formatted the whole disk, I think you get an msdos partition table by default. There has to be a partition table, even if the whole disk is one partition.
You dont want the whole disk one partition. You want
Note what @Daniel_Phillips said about mount points.
If you restore something from TS, it will have the old mount points. You will need to edit /etc/fstab and fix the UUID’s
before it will boot. You might need to hide /boot/grub/grub.cfg as well.
So if I understand correctly, the mount points will be different once I get the snapshot restored. If creating everything pre-restore:
EFI 512 MB (as boot?)
ext4 (root) remaining (as primary?)
swap 6 gb (as swap)
The mount points will obviously be different as before I had more partitions on the drive? I just didn’t consider that in the restore. Is that what TS meant about the hooks before rebooting? Did I need to check that before rebooting?
So once I have the disk ready, in trying to do as @nevj suggested and restore with nothing on the disk:
I run the restore
Before rebooting I edit fstab and fix UUIDs
Hide grub.cfg
A) how do I hide grub.cfg?
B) will I be able to see the new UUIDs in terminal from that live session I am using with TS for the restore? so that I can edit fstab to the new ones?
Thanks,
Sheila
One thing that might have helped earlier is to run gparted from the live session in stead of booting to it from the flash drive.
The options were limited in booting gparted. Now that I got into the live session and ran it, things are more familiar.
However, after creating gpt table and new partition for EFI, I just use Primary. But does swap need to be on the end? In other words, order matters?
EFI
Root
Swap
Thanks,
Sheila