timeshift
Latest reviews
This program is really good. It gives you the freedom to mess around with your system without having to worry about permanently breaking things.
Buggy, badly designed junk, with a years-long history of causing problems. No idea why Mint is still distributing this monstrosity, much less why it's included on the
helps lot when you mess your system and need backup, must for everyone especially beginners who mess there systems a lot in order to learn
Timeshift is a system restore so you can boot back up. Its defaults should be used that saves a copy of a bootable Linux system. Use a thumb drive to boot that has live CD of mint and use Timeshift to pick and restore an image. Use a backup to the cloud for stuff above the defaults of Timeshift. It's not a backup solution. It's a system only solution for when you can't boot. It's saved my ass many times. Oh, and I have Weekly/Keep 1, and Daily/Keep 2.
Use backintime instead. Timeshift stays running in the background even if auto snapshots aren't enabled, and it mounts my removable drive under /run/timeshift even though it is already mounted under /media -- which seems unnecessary and risky. Also it can fill the disk and freeze the system as others have pointed out. Also (unlike backintime) has no interface for easily restoring individual files or directories, so if you want to do that, you have to manually copy them using cp (or nemo if you must). Also, compared to backintime, Timeshift is barely configurable.
I have tried twice to restore mint 19.3 with rsync but failed to boot. I tried boot repair but still failed to boot. I give up on this app...
After I clicked the OK button for snapshots in Update Manager, this program promptly created a large enough glob of well hidden files to fill my entire hard disk making the system unbootable. 0 Mb free space. I would prefer that the system not do that to itself by default. Thanks.
It's saved me a few times. I give a $10 donation each time. I have a micro SD reader with a 64G card, so I can go back a long way. A restore takes less than 5 minutes. A VITAL utility. NOTE: you must run it in the background, if you have it open it doesn't take snapshots - this is confusing if you come from Windows. Set it up for timed backups and then check that it is, in fact, taking the backups. Once you understand this you can set up your backup schedule - just check occasionally that it's working and RELAX.
Time shift saved my life. I'm doing website development and one of my wordress sites in localhost screwed up. Thank you to time shift I was able to restore its previous configuration and now its up.
I used it for a while, but I had to uninstall it. I have little understanding of how it works, so I crashed my system using it. Fortunately, I did not have anything on it that was irreplaceable. I have been using Mint since 17.1, but I have not delved deeply into it, so I have problems completely removing apps I no longer want to use. In Mint 19.x I used Timeshift a few times to take me back to the place before I installed certain apps, and it worked great. However, one day I choose an option that I did not fully understand, and it corrupted Grub so that I could no longer boot into Mint. This forced me to reinstall Mint, disable the warning message that system snapshots were not set up, and uninstall Timeshift. This is definitely not a tool for the uninformed user.
Just saved me from having to redo my Mint 19/Win 10 dual-boot after I mounted my Windows partition to ~, wiping all content in ~ such as music, themes (of which I'd spent a lot of time on customizing), and more. I was unable to unmount it given that the terminal I was using to unmount was active. Am very glad I set up a backup schedule when first installing! Will recommend!
if using standard (ext4) filesystem rather than BTRFS you'll see that it takes large chunks of your hard drive. If not careful it will fill your disk space, requiring you to delete items to make your system useable again. Also, trying to delete these saved timestamps can be problematic as they still take diskspace when deleted: effectively a good way to waste large chunks of your harddisk for nothing. A good idea, with some use, but in general I would avoid until they solve problem with inability to clear disk space taken up by deleted timestamps and the potential to crash your system when timestamps fill HD (best alternative is to save timestamps to external HD that you can reformat if problems).
Timeshift made it virtually impossible for me to recover my data, by eating up all of the remaining free disk space. Not an intelligent app.
Starts when i working, slowing down computer. Why there are no exact time schedule????
This is a great program. I like to push my technical understanding of Linux beyond my actual skills, and this makes restoring to previous points perfect and simple.
Timeshift saved my life when I tried to install some proprietary drivers and failed.
Tried to run my first snapshot and it ran out of disk space very close to completion. After it errored out, the partial failed snapshot was not visible under timeshift but it didn't get deleted either. Uninstalling timeshift did not delete the failed snapshot files either, and as it had used up 100% of the disk space I couldn't even get online to search for a solution. I had to manually hunt down the timeshift files, change permissions since they were created with root ownership, and then delete them to get my system working again. Unpleasant waste of time. The failure modes need to be much more graceful than this or it'll remain a dangerous system toy not a real utility.