On 25 March 2016 at 13:08, jdd <jdd@dodin.org> wrote:
I mostly disagree on this conclusion.
you said yourself you used rollback only once. Was it that urgent? was the damage so hard it couldn't be debugged in some minutes?
I've used it a few times..2..maybe 3, in the last two years in one case - zypper, yast, bash, and zsh were gone.. yes, I didn't have much other choice in another, I was less than 5 minutes away from going on stage and giving an important presentation, which included demonstrating how openSUSE worked.
I disabled entirely the snapshots on my btrfs root. The extra size needed by default install is incredible. With 50Gb I was blocked by this system, when I use only 11Gb on a very loaded Leap root.
When I used them, none of my problems could be solved by them (didn't start better).
In fact most if not all serious problem I have are caused by me and for this there is no roll back. AFAIK, none of my essential installs had major problem for years (I love openSUSE :-)), so why I still have 13.1 on my servers, never any need to reinstall :-).
and there is a last reason. If ever one have to make a rollback after an update, what is his system good for? what is to be done with next update? I remember a recent advice "do not update to kernelXXX". But then what to do? no advice "now you can".
when you have a problem after 3 years of uninterrupted service, it may be time to go to fresh system :-)
snapper isn't just about rolling back because of package updates and package problems - it takes snapshots then because that is clearly a point of risk, but there are many, many other ways files in the root filesystem can be altered in a way that will lead to behaviour on your system you do not want btrfs and snapshots really are the way to go to avoid that. (SIDE NOTE: there has been a few comments about the 'granularity' of snapper that suggest that people do not know just how well it works. Unlike LVM and other blockbased snapshotting tools, btrfs snapshots are totally and utterly 'diffable' The snapper CLI and the YaST snapper tool let you compare, diff, and selectively rollback specific changes to any specific files between snapshots You can't really get more granular than that, and it also means snapper has an awesome secondary role as a diagnostic tool eg. You think a package install is missbehaving? No problem, do a diff between the pre and post snapshots on any package install and zypper will be able to tell you EXACTLY what that package install did to every file on your system) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org