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CRE ATE SYSTEM SNAPSHOTS WITH SNAPPER
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ADD AN EXTERNAL BTRFS PARTITION
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Tab completion is your friend. Let’s say you want to list all of the subvolumes attached to the root partition. You could accomplish it by typing sudo btrfs subvolume list / or sudo btrfs sub [tab] l [tab] /. At each stage, pressing Tab lists all of the potential next commands.
Snapper (http://snapper.io) is a well-known Btrfs helper tool that works from the command line. It can do most of the things that you can do with the bare Btrfs commands and more besides. There’s also a GUI front end that looks a bit like Timeshift. Snapper is now installed as part of Suse Linux and can tie into the YaSt configuration tool of that distribution.
The man pages on a Btrfs system are useful. man btrfs into a terminal gives you a general introduction to that command, and there are subsections for the subcommands. For example, man btrfsfilesystem displays subcommands that are related to filesystem functions.
You don’t have to have a Btrfs system partition to make use of some of the Btrfs facilities. So, you might set up a Btrfs-formatted external drive to store server files that you could then snapshot and roll back using Btrfs. In addition, you might need an external drive with a Btrfs to use to store Btrfs backups.