Btrfs Snapshot Integration in KDE
49 points by gnafuthegreat
49 points by gnafuthegreat
This is cool, and I really hate to rain on the parade, but... I have written before about how you should not trust btrfs with your data.
I feel annoying bringing this up in every btrfs submission I see, but I would rather be annoying and have someone's data not get eaten than be polite. In particular, an automatic btrfs snapshot setup, which this submission implies, is the most likely to run into today's most prominent btrfs problem, which is the pathological behavior of btrfs on very full disks.
and I really hate to rain on the parade
I feel annoying bringing this up in every btrfs submission I see
You are and you shouldn't. Being annoying won't help anyone not have their data eaten (even if what you suggest was true to some extent — as we all know, plural of anecdote is anecdote), it just makes you annoying.
I love to see this. A decent, easy to use, backup manager is long overdue for first class integration
Sounds like it uses btrfs specific apis. Could it be generalised for other snapshot-friendly filesystems (zfs)?
There are no common interfaces for snapshots. It's all completely filesystem-specific how they're handled. They also have different semantics - btrfs snapshots exist as another directory which is very different from what zfs does.
To be fair, there's .zfs/snapshots so a tool could find the file/directory in there and display each version that it sees. At least for browsing, it doesn't seem that hard.
sure, but low-level details are irrelevant for this use-case. in the end of the day, it is quite similar. can be abstracted as additional links to inodes
Yes, you could do that. I was just saying that you can't currently handle the snapshots using a generic interface. You can make the app generic, but only by adding other filesystem-specific implementation.
It's all completely filesystem-specific how they're handled
that's not entirely true, it should be possible to implement common API via ioctls, but probably not gonna happen too soon
(please see also systemd-{tmpfiles,nspawn} issues linked there)
https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/10681
Another win for KDE! Btrfs snapshots function quite well, I expect this to make them even more convenient. Integration of these new filesystem features into file browsers and desktop environments seems to progress rather slowly. As a Gnome user I'm hoping to see this feature too.
btrfs snapshots are great for backups. I use btrbk to make local snaphots from which files can be easily restored. I use borg backup to backup to a remote machine. Those backups are run on a btrfs snapshot to ensure the files do not change during the backup.
That KDE introduces a user-friendly backup solution is great.
I recently switched to Fedora, and thus btrfs, and I've been saved by snapshots twice now. I'm using Timeshift to manage them but building a GUI in to Dolphin sounds great.
This reminds me of Thunar NILFS plugin. It is long forgotten it seems and I found a screenshot only on German Wikipedia: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/NILFS#/media/Datei:Thunar_NILFS2.png
