r/archlinux • u/Away_Anywhere5843 • 19h ago
QUESTION Archinstall, Snapper Rollbacks, and Btrfs Assistant. What's Your Setup?
I’m testing out a standard Arch setup for work (installed via Archinstall with its default Btrfs layout) after spending a long time on Fedora. The thing that caught my attention the most was trying to do a system rollback with Snapper. I gave it a few shots—even following AI guides—but just couldn't get it to work. So I turned to a method I had previously dismissed back on Fedora: Btrfs Assistant, a really simple and user-friendly GUI. And well, it worked on the very first try to roll back my root partition.
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u/Toaster_Strudel_517 18h ago
Manual install, btrfs (for compression, not snapshots), luks2+opal encrypted disk.
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u/Specialist-Dog-501 18h ago
You can extend with grub-btrfs to have the system snapshots presented at boot time. When an system update kills your instance, you can select another snapshot at boot and voila, back at work.
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u/Deckma 16h ago
I did ext4 and used timeshift rsync snapshots. I did a manual install and I was more firmilar with how to setup ext4 to work with timeshift at the time. I came from Ubuntu/Mint that did everything for me so I tried to do things I was more familiar with and wouldn't mess up.
If I were to do it again I would probably go with btrfs and make the partion layout so it works with timeshift, it needs a specific layout for timeshift to use btrfs snapshots.
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u/archover 14h ago edited 13h ago
Welcome to Arch, from a long time Arch and Fedora user.
I've used ext4 almost entirely for my 15 years with Arch.
My setup is pretty ordinary. Two partitions (1 ESP and 1 LUKS, plus partitionless zram swap) with ext4, and systemd-boot and passphrase prompt. Only one kernel (linux package) installed as well.
I never had a situation where I felt Snapper based rollbacks would be advantageous. Subvols are interesting though.
Reason: Careful changes to config files and the system, with an eye to easy reversion, always worked for me. That, and the periodic system backups, and keeping my bit of developed code on git, has been effective.
Happy you found btrfs and Snapper helpful. I will say btrfs is very interesting from the tech perspective.
Good day.
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u/Junior_Common_9644 10h ago
EFI Partition with Grub
LUKS2 FDE
LVM inside LUKS2 with root volume and swap volume for hibernation
BTRFS root with /boot (inside the LUKS2 and LVM).
Users via systemd-homed, with the homes being LUKS2 encrypted BTRFS loopback files that grow and shrink for login/logout.
Journald retention of 1 hour.
/var/log on tmpfs
Root snapshots with Snapper
Only manual snapshots in a mounted home directory on rare occasion.
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u/ludonarrator 17h ago
I use my own tool, which is simpler and much lighter than snapper, to snapshot @home - a systemd timer kicks it off daily. timeshift-autosnap takes snapshots of @ before every update, and adds them as boot entries for convenience.
Frankly, if you can't follow wikis/READMEs and resort to "AI guides" you're headed for eventual disaster.
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u/Away_Anywhere5843 17h ago
Esta bien tu herramienta y es una gran idea. El único problema es que tienes que mantenerla tu mismo cosa q me parece tedioso
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u/nikongod 18h ago
My method is to use ext4 and not screw up.