Portal:Snapper/Topics

Overview

Snapper is a tool for Linux filesystem snapshot management. Apart from the obvious creation and deletion of snapshots, it can compare snapshots and revert differences between snapshots. In simple terms, this allows root and non-root users to view older versions of files and revert changes.

The features include:

Manually create snapshots
Automatically create snapshots, e.g. with YaST and zypp
Automatically create timeline of snapshots
Show and revert changes between snapshots
Works with btrfs, ext4 and thin-provisioned LVM volumes
Supports Access Control Lists and Extended Attributes
Automatic cleanup of old snapshots
Command line interface
D-Bus interface
PAM module to create snapshots during login and logout

Snapper and openSUSE

SUSE and openSUSE typically use the Btrfs file system for the root partition. Snapper uses the powerful snapshot capabilities of Btrfs to provide simple and powerful mechanism to restore the system to a previous known working state if something goes wrong. It takes a snapshot before and after invoking YaST or zypper, so if a miss-configuration occurs one can easily roll back to a previous known working snapshot. Snapshots can also be created manually at any time.

Documentation

man pages

snapper — Command-line program for filesystem snapshot management
snapperd - DBus daemon for snapper
snapper-configs — Configuration files for snapper configs
pam_snapper — PAM module which creates filesystem snapshots via "snapper"
snapper-zypp-plugin — Snapper plugin for libzypp
snapper-zypp-plugin.conf — Configuration file for snapper-zypp-plugin
mksubvolume — Command-line program to create btrfs subvolume

Development

Development

Packages

Snapper RPM packages are available on standard openSUSE installation media. You can find snapper packages for various distributions in the buildservice.

In the Media