openmediavault-timeshift 7.0

Zitat von Superorb

So what's the point of doing hourly backups if the system rarely changes? I was following a youtube OMV guide to do weekly snapshots.

The point of making snapshots is to be able to restore a previous state when you or something else messes up your system. Having more restore points is obviously better for this. Since only the difference from the previous snapshot needs new space, this doesn't take insane amounts of disk space or computing power and is done almost instantly - more so if the system rarely changes. What's the point in purposely not doing this?

The plug-in can easily be configured to only save daily, weekly or monthly snapshots though if that's what you want.

Zitat von DonkeeeyKong

The point of making snapshots is to be able to restore a previous state when you or something else messes up your system. Having more restore points is obviously better for this. Since only the difference from the previous snapshot needs new space, this doesn't take insane amounts of disk space or computing power and is done almost instantly - more so if the system rarely changes. What's the point in purposely not doing this?

The plug-in can easily be configured to only save daily, weekly or monthly snapshots though if that's what you want.

Ok, so if doing daily snapshots would be a better interval what settings do I need to use for a 1am daily snapshot? The plugin is not clear and I can't find any info or guide beyond "set to what you want" which I'd love to do if I knew how.

Zitat von Superorb

Ok, so if doing daily snapshots would be a better interval what settings do I need to use for a 1am daily snapshot? The plugin is not clear and I can't find any info or guide beyond "set to what you want" which I'd love to do if I knew how.

Please read the link I gave you: https://teejeetech.com/timeshift/ The plugin is very clear. The program is just not designed the way you want to use it.

Zitat

Unlike similar tools that are scheduled to take backups at a fixed time of the day, Timeshift is designed to run once every hour and take snapshots only when a snapshot is due. This is more suitable for desktop users who keep their laptops and desktops switched on for few hours daily. Scheduling snapshots at a fixed time on such users will result in missed backups since the system may not be running when the snapshot is scheduled to run. By running once every hour and creating snapshots when due, Timeshift ensures that backups are not missed.

You can probably make a snapshot manually at 1 am and then set it to daily. I am not sure if this works though...

Timeshift checks the age of the snapshots. The check is run every hour, if the snapshot is more than 24h old then it will run a new snapshot (if you take only daily snapshots, same principle apply if you do weekly or monthly snapshots).

so if you want a snapshot at a particular time (e.g. daily), delete all old snapshots, disable the plugin. then set it up again at the time you want to run the snapshots and you will have them running always at the same time.

..but then again, i don't understand all the fuss, why bother? just set it up and don't worry too much, I have a low power system and I don't see it taking much resources.....

...unless you use it to backup data...and then you're missing the point of this tool....

Thanks guys for your patience with me being clueless. The two cron posts above are what confused me, as I thought cron was used to schedule and the numbers in the plugin made no sense to me. The timing seems to be based on whenever the initial snapshot is taken.

Zitat von ryecoaaron

As I mentioned in post #19 of this thread... For daily snapshots, just set the hourly to 0 and daily to the number of snapshots you want to keep greater than 0. You don't get to pick a time and there is no way to do that (not in the timeshift config).

Ya, I definitely did not understand how Timeshift operated. So if I wanted to do daily snapshots (and keep 10 snapshots rolling) I'd set daily to 10 and everything else to 0?

Zitat von ryecoaaron

Sure but why not keep weekly and monthly snaps?

What's the benefit of weekly and monthly over daily? Why be doing all of them? Is this just to roll back further than the daily record, like if you keep 12 monthly snapshots for a year rolling instead of a week of dailies?

Gotcha, thanks. I've enabled everything. File sizes are very small for the incremental snapshots so why not.

Thank you for adding the Timeshift plugin.

I've been setting up an OMV install and Timeshift seemed like a convenient way to easily back up and restore the os. I have snapshots, and now trying to test restoring, I ran into an issue. The restoration process hasn't ignored my data drives and now wants to mount them into the restore target, which fails due them being mounted 'exclusively' already in the running system (which seems to happen for NTFS drives?). The restore process also warns about modifying said data drives for some reason. I had the default ignores (including '/dev/srv/**') and only wanted to back up the os drive. Haven't been able to find anything online about this issue, and the timeshift cli doesn't seem to have a way to ignore those data drives. Using a live rescue os would prob fix this, but I specifically want to be able to restore from within OMV because I won't be able to access the physical device in the future (I will have a back up OMV install on a USB stick to restore with/to, ready to be swapped in by a non techie person who can access the system). The Timeshift plugin restore function gives the same error as using the timeshift cli interactively, so the plugin seems to be working fine, but this seems like an issue that would come up more with OMV than the typical desktop use case so hopefully the plugin can do something to work around this issue.

Link to a screenshot of my timeshift cli session:

Screenshot, 2024-08-11 18:11:29 - Paste.Pics

paste.pics

EDIT:

By turning off the external drives that failed to mount I managed to get the restore going (also didn't list those drives in the list of affected drives). Sadly some sort of corruption happened and the resulting root system was faulty (web UI wasn't loading properly, and something was wrong with networking in general). I ofc have multiple backups which I can restore manually. Currently I'm thinking of making a separate recovery bootable (to be plugged in by the non techie hosting the machine) and use that for restoring backups remotely from (compressed) full disk images like the OMV Backup utility makes. The kernel plugin does have the SystemRescue image but I wouldn't be able to reach that remotely (I'm going to use Zerotier for remote access so I don't have to deal with the remote network infra with port forwarding etc)

EDIT2:

Just so there's no confusion, the TImeshift snapshots didn't actually include anything from the external drives AFAICT, but just somehow included them in the restoration process

Zitat von diiii

The restoration process hasn't ignored my data drives and now wants to mount them into the restore target

Zitat von diiii

EDIT:

By turning off the external drives that failed to mount I managed to get the restore going

Is restoration still a problem if data drives are mounted or has this been sorted out?

Hi, also new to this. So do my settings for timeshift make sense? Thanks.

Because it may be that when I configure the plugin to save the snapshots in another partition like sda3, it saves two instances: one copy in /timeshift/snapshots, in sda1, and another in the configured destination (sda3)?

think about using this plugin and have a few remaining points to clarify.
As described it is a "clone" to "simulate" what Windows systems have included out of the box. So to can go back, when a system update isn´t what you wanted etc.

Here my question starts. What is defined as "System" and what gets snapshotted?

For example because of space requirements i have symlinked /var/lib/docker to a larger drive away from / (root).

So does timeshift follow symlinks?

Are those additional things like docker or libvirt defined as part of the system?

Is there a "dry run" mode available, so i can see whats get into the snapshot and what not?

I don´t quite understand the interface yet.

Settings screen talks about backup device. What does this actually mean?

- The device which gets snapshotted?

- The device which saved the snapshots?

- both

The link posted by somebody (dev-site?) tells, there will be a timedhift folder, normally on / (this would be bad in my case, as this has 32 GB. I want to have the snapshots on a different drive. As i have difficulties to understand the settings page, i don´t know where to configure this.

If i assume, that the settings screen is configuring the destination, and the "on demand snapshot" selects the source, then i´ve configured the largest drive as destination and my 32gb boot drive as source and got this:

ounted '/dev/sda1' at '/run/timeshift/3727395/backup'
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Estimating system size...
Creating new snapshot...(RSYNC)
Saving to device: /dev/sda1, mounted at path: /run/timeshift/3727395/backup
Syncing files with rsync... 0.00% complete (??? remaining) E: rsync returned an error
E: Failed to create new snapshot
Failed to create snapshot
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Removing snapshots (incomplete):
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Removing '2025-07-16_14-17-21'... 0.00% complete (??? remaining) Removed '2025-07-16_14-17-21'
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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