this short tutorial will describe how to respond if your system got screwed by Timeshift.
Symptoms
Linux Mint suddenly reports shortage of disk space (e.g. < 500 MB) for no obvious reason. You didn't install anything large which explains why your system should have not much disk space left.
If you fail to react this leads to the so called "Login Loop". This is the phenomenon, that you are getting to your login screen at system start up as usual, but after entering correct username and passoword you are presented with a black screen for a short period of time and get right back to the login screen. This is an endless loop.
If you fail to understand what happens here, you finally end up in a situation where not even the login screen appears anymore. On system start up you are stuck at the point where the command line login is shown. (This is also seen for a short while right before the login screen loads on usual start up.)
Reasons
If Timeshift is configured wrongly or buggy, it will consume all your disk space to save system/file backup data. This seems to be a long known issue by developers and more experienced users, surely not for newbies like me, but never got fixed.
It is known that one reason for the Login Loop can be the lack of disk space on your root partition. For running correctly your root partition needs some free space to save temporary files and such. And even the login screen itself needs some disk space left. If your root partition has no disk space left, even the login screen will fail to load.
Solution
1) If you are presented with the Login Loop, press [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[F1] which will switch to the command line prompt. If you are already presented with it, nothing to do so far.
2) Check for your disk space:
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df -hT
3) If it is indeed the case, that you have not enough disk space, you should free some immediately. You may try to delete some Timeshift snapshots but for me this didn't work, because......... not enough disk space... The same is true for many other commands to delete files. They will fail because not enough disk space is left. You need just enough free space to be able to delete the snapshots which occupy all the space.
Hint: Also it will not work to start the desktop environment by
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startx
Delete Order
Remove unrequired packages.
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sudo apt-get autoremove
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sudo apt-get autoclean
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sudo apt-get clean
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sudo journalctl --vacuum-time=3d
Use rerserved disk space for root partition
As suggested here: viewtopic.php?t=253502, you could also try to use the reserved space for the root partition.
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sudo tune2fs -m0 /dev/sda1
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sudo tune2fs -m5 /dev/sda1
There is a command line version of Timeshift which can be used to manage it.
List all snapshots:
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timeshift --list
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timeshift --delete --snapshot '2020-04-30_...'
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timeshift --delete-all
In case you are in the command line, and you want to switch to the desktop environment, use
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startx
Of course, you could also just restart your pc by
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shutdown -r
Hello Desktop, we're back!
5) Immediately after logging in to your account, start Timeshift. Menue > System management > Timeshift or by the search. Go to settings > time table and unclick all planned snapshot plans and confirm (this deactivates Timeshift, highly recommended). Also delete all remaining snapshots from your partition through this application (if these are available, which doesn't seem always to be the case).
EDIT: If you really want to use TimeShift, read this tutorial by Havea Mint and TimeShift's manual. If you don't understand everything, do not use TimeShift.
I hope this tutorial helps you to identify and fix this problem rather quickly, it took me around 6h to understand everything the newbie I am (time I actually planned to do work in Linux Mint, not fixing it).
Kobalt