As an atheist, I ask for prayers that the backup's good.
E: Your solidarity has worked. The backup is good and not too old. Note for myself and you - install your OS on a snapshotting filesystem so that live backups are possible.
this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2026
195 points (97.6% liked)
PC Master Race
22423 readers
344 users here now
A community for PC Master Race.
Rules:
- No bigotry: Including racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia. Code of Conduct.
- Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
- No NSFW content.
- No Ads / Spamming.
- Be thoughtful and helpful: especially when new beginners have questions.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This is your OS disk? How would having a snapshotting OS like btrfs have helped in your situation?
Root on Btrfs/ZFS would have ensured I have a root backup from an hour ago. Ext4 (without LVM) means I can only make a backup every now and then when I turn off the machine, boot into alt OS and take an offline copy.
With the disk effectively fubar how would the snapshot from an hour ago of helped?
Would've been transferred to the big redundant storage. Whe using ZFS in particular, local snapshots are essentially instant, then ZFS transfers only the missing snapshot delta to the other ZFS storage, delta tends to be very small and therefore fast. Put those thigs together and hourly live full system backups become very practical. I already have this setup for my laptop. Restoring a complete system from backup becomes - ZFS sync from the backup to the new drive, restore the EFI partition, boot from it.