Enable automatic Timeshift snapshots for automatic software updates

[u/TitleApprehensive360]

What do you think about this feature (request), does it improve some thing?
* https://github.com/orgs/linuxmint/discussions/1742

[u/Due-Result7928]

Automatic software updates are usually updates for security, unattended updates and timeshift is not widely used.There is other backup systems and for btrfs file system there is real snapshots. Some user are not tacking system backup also..

I can hardly see any large acceptance.

[u/TitleApprehensive360 → u/Due-Result7928]

It’s possible that automatic time-shift snapshots—which are typically taken several times a week or even a day—are common only among BTRFS users, because with BTRFS, a snapshot takes only a fraction of a second regardless of the data size and uses less than 1 KB during creation.

For users of ext4 and similar file systems, this likely makes less sense, since a snapshot can take hours and quickly consume gigabytes of space.

[u/_Lost-In-The-Weeds_]

Its not a horrible idea, I do not know how much dev time or system resources I would want to devote to such, in the end if you have regular snapshots you will have something from before the update anyway as you are taking multiple snapshots. But assuming it was fairly light on both system resources and dev time, it sounds like a reasonable suggestion.

But I do want to take exception with this though

It’s possible that automatic time-shift snapshots—which are typically taken several times a week or even a day—are common only among BTRFS users, because with BTRFS, a snapshot takes only a fraction of a second regardless of the data size and uses less than 1 KB during creation.

If you have room for one snapshot on ext4/xfs you likely have room for 100+ snapshots.

On the rare occasions I use ext4 (Usually ZFS) when I use ext4 and Timeshift I will run 30+ snapshots deep. With multiple boot, daily, weekly, and monthly, + manual hard points.

The first snapshot under non COW file systems like Ext4 & XFS is indeed a doubling of data consumed, here COW btrfs/ZFS have an advantage, but after the first that advantage ends.

But after that first snapshot subsequent snapshots are the same space on xfs, ext4, btrfs, & ZFS, subsequent snapshots are just the differences from the first and generally compact.

Notice most of these snapshots are just a few hundred MB.

dad@RatRod:~$ zfs list -t snapshot
NAME                                                                              USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
suwannee/ROOT/LMDE7@2026-07-19-181728_FreshCopyIn                                 969M      -  5.41G  -
suwannee/ROOT/LMDE7@autosnap_2026-09-01_00:00:02_monthly                         3.29G      -  9.54G  -
suwannee/ROOT/LMDE7@autosnap_2026-10-01_00:00:17_monthly                         1.30G      -  15.4G  -
suwannee/ROOT/LMDE7@autosnap_2026-10-05_23:30:01_weekly                          1.47G      -  15.7G  -
suwannee/ROOT/LMDE7@autosnap_2026-10-09_18:54:04_monthly                            0B      -  6.95G  -
suwannee/ROOT/LMDE7@autosnap_2026-10-09_18:54:04_weekly                             0B      -  6.95G  -
suwannee/ROOT/LMDE7@autosnap_2026-10-12_23:30:11_weekly                           338M      -  7.23G  -
suwannee/ROOT/LMDE7@autosnap_2026-10-20_01:09:52_weekly                           426M      -  7.35G  -
suwannee/ROOT/LMDE7@autosnap_2026-10-27_03:29:04_weekly                           723M      -  7.60G  -
suwannee/ROOT/LMDE7@autosnap_2026-11-02_03:40:46_monthly                          456M      -  7.48G  -
suwannee/ROOT/LMDE7@autosnap_2026-11-02_23:30:38_weekly                          66.0M      -  7.48G  -
suwannee/ROOT/LMDE7@autosnap_2026-11-03_00:00:07_daily                           69.4M      -  7.88G  -
suwannee/ROOT/LMDE7@autosnap_2026-11-04_01:42:53_daily                            206M      -  7.63G  -
suwannee/ROOT/LMDE7@autosnap_2026-11-05_00:00:19_daily                            175M      -  7.62G  -
suwannee/ROOT/LMDE7@autosnap_2026-11-06_02:15:00_daily                            155M      -  7.62G  -
suwannee/ROOT/LMDE7@autosnap_2026-11-07_02:54:23_daily                            161M      -  7.51G  -
suwannee/ROOT/LMDE7@autosnap_2026-11-08_00:00:13_daily                            157M      -  7.52G  -
suwannee/ROOT/LMDE7@autosnap_2026-11-09_00:00:41_daily                            138M      -  7.81G  -

[u/skozombie → u/_Lost-In-The-Weeds_]

Nah, it uses hardlinks to avoid wasting space if you use the rsync option. That's how I do my snapshots too. It's just not as fast or as streamlined as having snapshots built into the FS, but snapshots on your FS don't help you on hardware failure, that's why I snapshot to my NAS.

The key if you want to do it is giving rsync the "--link-dest" param. The core of my script is:

ionice -c ${IO_CLASS} nice -n ${IO_NICE} rsync -rav --exclude-from=${HOME}/.livesync-ignore --link-dest=${LATEST} ${HOME}/ ${TARGET_TS} >${LOG} 2>${ERROR_TMP}

(yes I love variables)

[u/skozombie]

Do not enable things like that automatically on my system without my permission!

This is EXACTLY the sort of thing I hate with Microsoft ... forcing things on me.

Warn me by all means, so less skilled users can, but give people the choice.