Well, not a noob, more like an idiot 😂 EDIT: Yes, on the same drive as my Home folder, etc. And yes, technically they’re snapshots, not backups.
I’ve been in a similar situation
edit: For context, there was a bug with the graphics driver that was putting out an error every frame, at 200+ fps… needless to say, I could actively see the log growing in size
Holy shit
right? what the hell?
Mmmm somebody need some log rotate in their life.
Oh my production s***'s on point but all the Dave and QA s*** I need at least one failure before I get around to doing law rotate. I guess I should spend the time to make the ansible job.
Best thing that I’ve ever done was to write automate a weekly script that makes a ZFS snapshot and then deletes any that are over a month old.
That’s a very good idea. Might wanna keep an additional yearly one too though, in case you don’t use the computer actively for a while and realize you have to go back more than a month at some point.
Ya, I offsite backup the entire zpool once a year at least. I have quarterly and yearly snapshots too.
But the weeklies have saved me on several occasions, the others haven’t been needed yet.
I recently realized I forgot to use reflink copy on an XFS filesystem and ran duperemove which freed ~600GB of data
The humble 50GB /var/cache/pacman/pkg on my 256GB drive.
Every. Time.
Filelight: /var/cache/pacman/pkg 👀
Paccache helps, but sometimes a nuke is needed to clean up pkg.
lol, you can just set it up to keep the latest snapshots only.
(noob here)
we are all noobs in some regard. I’ve been using linux for private and work for 3 years and I don’t know shit about tineshift. linux is such a diverse ecosystem and there’s so many places to make mistakes and learn. It never stops. I fully expect to be bricking my machine on accident well into my 60s
I have been using Linux for over 20 years and this post is the first time I’ve heard about timeshift. I use Arch, btw.
ironically, arch users are the only users who I’ve heard talking about timeshift because apparently its the best way to roll back after an update breaks sth?
Timeshift plus the package that automatically takes a snapshot on system update is so clutch.
Hmmm… My laptop is an x200s I bought new in 2008 and I still have the original install, I dd’d it to an ssd circa 2014 or so and has been happility running since. I have a desktop from 2018 same story, it never broke it beyond repair.
Learning about new things is the best thing about Linux. I keep a folder with screenshots and saved html pages for all the fixes, workarounds and settings I’ve accumulated over the two years I’ve used Linux on my desktop. Highly recommend keeping a similar folder.
Yup.
Every time I fix something difficult I document it in great detail in Obsidian. It’s a good feeling of, ‘‘I’ll never have to be confused by this problem again’’.
I reference it constantly too, so it isn’t a waste of time. The waste of time would be not doing it.
I just edit my configuration.nix and commit it to source control. The commit message is the documentation. If I’m feeling extra generous I’d add a comment
I keep a text file with all useful commands on the desktop and have a alias in terminal to access it quickly via nano. Works very well.
A piece of paper with the nvim shortcuts has saved me many tens of seconds
Everytime I stumble upon something it take some quick notes and put “I should start blogging this” on my bucket list. Then immediately forget about the blogging part until I take the next note…
If it makes you fell any better, after doing a fresh install, I tried a “finally finished setting everything up” backup and was immediately out of space.
Turns out it was saving backups to my boot sector. 🤦🤦🤦🤦🤦🤦
pip cache is another common culprit, I’ve seen up to 50GB
node_modules has entered the chat
There was once a 220 GB log file on my pi-hole server. Probably was a bug though.
“dust” is my go-to cli thing for finding what’s taking up hard drive space.
Speaking of, I should check my timeshirt settings
Same like me who never realized i have so many BTRFS Snapper backup in every end of year.
Is there no way to have timeshift auto delete ? I guess thats not how it works huh
It does have autodelete, dont remember of its the default, but i think it explicitly offers you the option when you set it up
I recently had 2/3 of drive space taken by btrfs snapshots. Still learning to manage them properly :D
BTRFS + Snapper + BTRFS assistant has been pretty good for me
I usually set up a completely separate partition on a different drive for Timeshift. That way it doesn’t gradually eat away at system space on the main drive. And even if it was on there, it would have already eaten all that space in readiness, so to speak.
Also, I don’t have it backing up my home directory. I do that separately.
But that said, this post has given me the reminder to see if there are any old snapshots that could do with deleting. And there were a few. It’s now back down to roughly the same size as my main OS install again, which is about as big as it needs to be if you think about it.
“Backups” to the same disk?
Personally i use them in case an update messes stuff up. So i can restore it back.
So not backups, but snapshots.
Yeah, snapshots. It would make more sense to store them on a different drive, but I can’t add an additional drive into my PC (it’s a prebuilt so I’m waiting until I can afford a new PC) and I can’t be bothered with saving them to an external hard drive.
To be fair, I wouldn’t consider storing it on one additional drive in the same PC to be backup either. One theft, lightning strike, fire or even just a stupid mistake on your own part and that “backup” is a goner
Just curious. No spare SATA ports?
