This is your annual reminder to do a snapshot (timeshift or whatever you prefer) before doing relatively minor changes to your system.

I was supposed to be in bed now, but instead I am stuck troubleshooting xorg refusing to start after an apt-get dist-upgrade.

And as far as friendly reminders go, I should’ve given myself an unfriendly reminder beforehand, as it’s not the first time…

UPDATE: Fuck nvidia 545. All my homies hate nvidia 545. 535 4 lyf!

  •  antsu   ( @antsu@lemmy.wtf ) 
    9•6 months ago

    Timeshift with BTRFS kicks ass. I have mine set for daily snapshots, retained for a week. Only the changes between snapshots are stored, so the extra disk usage is minimal, and easily justified by the peace of mind in case of fuck-ups or broken updates.

    •  dan   ( @dan@upvote.au ) 
      1•6 months ago

      Only the changes between snapshots are stored, so the extra disk usage is minimal

      If you want to use a similar approach for backups, Borgbackup is a pretty nice piece of software. I have two backups of my most important files: One on my NAS at home, and one “in the cloud” on a storage VPS (ends up way cheaper than using S3, B2 or anything like that).

    •  neidu2   ( @neidu2@feddit.nl ) OP
      9•6 months ago

      Timeshift. It has an easy to understand GUI that doesn’t really need much of an intro: You create snapshots of your system files and configs that can be restored if/when you bungle it up.

        •  neidu2   ( @neidu2@feddit.nl ) OP
          3•6 months ago

          There are many approaches, depending on what broke. In my case the system was fine, just xorg being completely borked. So I logged into the console and fixed it.

          If regular console doesn’t work, something really went bad during boot, for which there’s single-user mode which is kind of similar to safe mode from Windows 98 (I’m sure there’s something similar in newer windows versions).

          And of that doesn’t work, there’s the minimalistic rescue shell.

          And if that doesn’t work, you can boot from a USB or some other external media and try to fix your system from that, maybe even using chroot to use the system somewhat normally.

  •  Extras   ( @Extrasvhx9he@lemmy.today ) 
    7•6 months ago

    Is it dumb that I only backup my docs and anything else I think is important? I can rebuild fairly quickly if something would happen. I ask since I know that people backup a variety of their directories

  •  palordrolap   ( @palordrolap@kbin.social ) 
    3•6 months ago

    Am on LMDE6 with an ancient Nvidia card. Because I’ve had to resort to using the Nvidia OEM driver installer (which can be a pain to use), installed Xorg updates lurk quietly until a full reboot at which point they generally cause offloading of GPU tasks to the CPU instead because it hasn’t figured things out properly.

    Timeshift has been useful at least twice in getting me back to a less stressed system.

    I think I have a procedure figured out now though (documented here for posterity even if it helps no-one today):

    1. Make a Timeshift snapshot just in case

    2. Install the pending Xorg update

    3. Reboot so it’s fully active

    4. Check to see if GPU tasks are being offloaded to the CPU by doing something graphics intensive and noting temperatures or usage%. If not, a miracle has occurred and continuing isn’t needed.

    5. sudo remove the execute permission on /usr/bin/Xorg so that it can’t immediately be restarted by subsystems designed to protect the average Mint user from command lines and consoles.

    6. Kill Xorg

    7. Log in through a console, via Ctrl+Alt+F1 or similar if not dumped to one by killing Xorg.

    8. Re-install the Nvidia OEM driver

    9. sudo put the aforementioned execute permission back on

    10. Repeat steps 2 and 3 and hope that this time the GPU is doing the work.

    Reboots ought to be replaceable by running specific commands, but I haven’t gone deep enough into things to know the right things to do there. Reboots are quick and easy enough.

    Obvious intermediate steps include not doing anything else important during this and saving important work before starting.

    e.g. did you know it’s possible to bookmark all open tabs? Well worth looking into.

  •  imnapr   ( @imnapr@discuss.tchncs.de ) English
    2•6 months ago

    The nvidia 545 drivers are an absolute dumpster fire. Even for beta drivers they are easily the worst drivers I’ve ever used. They claim to fix the vrr gsync bug tho… so as soon as they fix gestures broadly everything else, maybe they’ll be good

  •  lemmyvore   ( @lemmyvore@feddit.nl ) English
    2•6 months ago

    I’m on 545 and I have no issues. But I’m also not using Ubuntu…

    Maybe it’s the distro that’s the problem not the backup. I mean I’d rather have a distro with smooth updates than one that makes me need snapshots.

    What’s even the point with such a distro, ok so I restore previous working state, then what, I can’t do updates anymore? Living in fear of official updates sounds terrible.

    •  ReversalHatchery   ( @ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org ) 
      3•6 months ago

      I think it’s just dumb to not make a backup before large updates. There’s so many things happening, a lot can go wrong, especially if you have added 3rd party repos and have customized core parts of the system, not just through config files but let’s say you switched to latest kde plasma from the one your distro ships.

      And what happens if you have to restore the backup?
      You can look up what’s the solution to your problem in peace while everything is still working. If it was a server, all the services are still available, if it was your desktop you don’t have to use a live linux usb that’s without all your configs to find the solution

      •  lemmyvore   ( @lemmyvore@feddit.nl ) English
        1•6 months ago

        You make a good point. Ubuntu gives you so many ways to shoot yourself in the foot that it’s pretty much a given that it will get messed up eventually. So you have to use snapshots.

        On Arch based distros the updates just work. I’ve never had to snapshot anything. But having just one single community repo (AUR) contributes to that a great deal.

              •  lemmyvore   ( @lemmyvore@feddit.nl ) English
                1•6 months ago

                Of course it can. And your PC can also fall off the desk. I’m saying a snapshot tool is a really poor solution for distro problems, it’s really a bandaid for a problem that shouldn’t exist.

                Use a decent distro, take proper backups, and use snapshots for what they were intended — recovering small mistakes with personal files, not for system maintenance.

                •  null   ( @null@slrpnk.net ) 
                  1•6 months ago

                  Use a decent distro

                  That’s the point – your claim about deb-based distros is just anecdotal.

                  The example here is Nvidia updates borking the system. I’ve have that happen to me numerous times on Arch-based systems.

                  I’ve run deb-based distros on some boxes over years of updates with no issues. On the other hand I’ve had updates cause breakages on Arch-based systems pretty much every time I’ve run them.

                  Which is to say anecdotes are useless, updates can break systems, and being able to immediately roll back to a working system and deal with updating later is a simple, nice thing to have with no downsides.