My understanding is that TimeShift is really meant as a "system restore" point - and there by NOT saving of restoring home data.
There are a few things here that I see / have experienced:
First, as far as I am concerned the primary users home folder SHOULD be setup in timeshift as this is kind of a critical area and I believe that it should be recoverable. (Including and especially the .config and other important 'config' files.) As such, I include the home folder for my machines.
Second, I have been bitten by "just restoring" a timeshift restore where something went wrong and I blindly restored. The loss was minimal as I dont really work in the home area - however, I lost snapshots, pdf's and couple of pictures that I had taken off my camera that morning and before the regular scheduled timeshift ran that day.
The restore is a "state restore" .. and in my case was from the night before. SO.. I learned to create another timeshift, before the restore. Then I can walk back in - compare what is missing and then manually recover those 'lost files'.
Last.. most users keep real data in home and lower, so mail, documents, pictures etc etc are all prone to an issue if you are blindly restoring and have added ~/ . Also, image how large these timeshift snapshot can get if things like Virtual Machines and encrypted vaults are in that snapshot! ( Most of my data is NOT in my ~/home folder, so on my machine its not horrible to restore.)
Imo - in a perfect world... TimeShift saves / resovers the system. Your backup can save your settings and data. There of course can be wiggle room here.. but not sure how many 'regular' users are going to / should mess with this.
There are a few things here that I see / have experienced:
First, as far as I am concerned the primary users home folder SHOULD be setup in timeshift as this is kind of a critical area and I believe that it should be recoverable. (Including and especially the .config and other important 'config' files.) As such, I include the home folder for my machines.
Second, I have been bitten by "just restoring" a timeshift restore where something went wrong and I blindly restored. The loss was minimal as I dont really work in the home area - however, I lost snapshots, pdf's and couple of pictures that I had taken off my camera that morning and before the regular scheduled timeshift ran that day.
The restore is a "state restore" .. and in my case was from the night before. SO.. I learned to create another timeshift, before the restore. Then I can walk back in - compare what is missing and then manually recover those 'lost files'.
Last.. most users keep real data in home and lower, so mail, documents, pictures etc etc are all prone to an issue if you are blindly restoring and have added ~/ . Also, image how large these timeshift snapshot can get if things like Virtual Machines and encrypted vaults are in that snapshot! ( Most of my data is NOT in my ~/home folder, so on my machine its not horrible to restore.)
Imo - in a perfect world... TimeShift saves / resovers the system. Your backup can save your settings and data. There of course can be wiggle room here.. but not sure how many 'regular' users are going to / should mess with this.
Statistics: Posted by CharlesV — Sat Dec 30, 2023 8:34 pm