Accessing the powerful Btrfs snapshot features with Snapper
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Snapper lets you restore a system to its previous state – with a little help from Btrfs snapshots.
The openSUSE project believes in the Btrfs filesystem [1]. Btrfs has been the filesystem for the root partition since openSUSE 13.2 and version 12 of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES).
Work on the Btrfs filesystem has been going on for about eight years. Btrfs, like ZFS [2], relies on functions that are not usually included in a filesystem's repertoire. In addition to an extended storage area, Btrfs includes support for RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, and 10, as well as snapshots, subvolumes, and the ability to defragment partitions during operation. You can even convert ext3/4 partitions to Btrfs, after creating a backup, using the btrfs-convert command from the Btrfs-tools package.
A tool called Snapper leverages the powers of Btrfs to provide what the developers call "the ultimate snapshot tool for Linux." Snapper offers a variety of convenient features for recording the system state. According to the Snapper portal at the openSUSE site, "Apart from the obvious creation and deletion of snapshots, Snapper can compare snapshots and revert differences between snapshots. In simple terms, this capability allows root and non-root users to view older versions of files and revert changes."
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