just about everyone using Linux Mint has seen the word Timeshift, and has some inkling of what it does.
However, miss use of it keeps popping up, and and there seems to be newbies, as well as other users who have it running, but don't think about what it can do to repair their OS.
A recent thread occurred like this about 3 days ago, and the member here commented in almost the last post of his thread, that the idea of "repairing his OS" and getting it to work again, with Timeshift just had not occurred to him.
He had tried a lot of different ways of making things work right again, and by the time someone had entered the frey, his last good Timeshift was gone.
Today, thinking back over this one person's situation made me think that "only if" his Timeshift had been set up properly, he could have recovered from his problems without having to do a fresh install.... at least his data was still good.
So, with that idea in my head, I thought I would present my view of how to schedule Timeshift.
- TS Schedule.png (22.99 KiB) Viewed 1430 times
Looking at this Schedule that I have set up, my thoughts were:
1) Make a Monthly the basis of the whole scheme, and keep 2 of those.
2) Make Weekly snapshots and keep 3 of those.
a 4th one is the same as a Monthly so don't need a 4th Weekly.
3) Make Daily snapshots and keep 5 of those. could keep 6, but in practice, 5 has been enough for me, and a Weekly is only 2 days older.
In the situation that I depicted above, the member here would have been able to use the last weekly, or at worst, the 2nd to last, being only a few days older than the point at which he was experiencing trouble.
For the most part, for me. I generally recognize something is amiss within a day or two, but I recall a situation that occurred to me about 2 months ago, that I had made some innocuous little changes and simply forget to write them down.
At that time, I was not using the depth of recovery that I am showing here now. I had to drop back more than 5 days, to catch the last "On Demand" snapshot. Nothing serious happened, but over the next week, I became aware of missing applications that I had installed, but suddenly were not in my Menu anymore. ( SimpleScreenRecorder )
That was when I decided I needed to be more methodical with Timeshift.
I will comment here, that my Image backups are rare, at roughly 6 months, if I remember to do one then.
I've been on Mint now since vs 17.2 and enjoying every minute of it. I constantly learn new things by watching the gurus here help others out.
I'm not a guru yet, never will be, way too old at 78, and have a mind crippling injury whereby my memory is only good for 15 minutes. ( the result of a bad vehicle accident )
So, with that, I hope this thread is useful to someone, even just one, will make it worth it.
My personal Boo Boo is installing someone's fresh idea, using PPAs, or trying out a fancy Terminal Command I have not seen before......
and it causes a problem for me... Timeshift, lets me backup to just a few hours previous and all is good again.
for me, Timeshift runs at 00:01 every day.
I use BackInTime for /home/folder backups, but that is for another discussion.
