Re: Return a Debian system to a pristine state

[songbird <songbird@anthive.com>]

Tom Dial wrote:
...
> In the fairly large number of posts in this thread I don't recall seeing
> file system snapshots suggested. My current preference is ZFS, which I
> know from experience to be up to what I understand to be the goal here.

  both timeshift and partclone have been mentioned.  both
can be used to do snapshots.  while i have not fully tested
either of them lately.

  i see now that there is clonezilla too.  again i've not
had cause to test any of these out, but i suspect they'd
work.


> However, root on ZFS is a distinctly non-standard and hands on install
> that is fairly straightforward and decently documented, but not for
> everyone. Moreover, ZFS is not DFSG and GPL compliant, and quite a few
> users would avoid it because of that.
>
> Alternatives include LVM and btrfs, and possibly others. I have used LVM
> snapshots a little, but not for this use case. It appears to have the
> capability to accomplish the objective, as described in
>
> https://linuxconfig.org/create-and-restore-manual-logical-volume-snapshots
>
> for instance.
>
> I have not used btrfs and therefore have no opinion about its fitness
> for the case at hand.


  songbird