zfs-autosnap

This Arch Linux package automatically creates and manages ZFS snapshots before system upgrades. It is designed to protect your system by creating reliable snapshots prior to major package updates, triggered by a Pacman hook.

Features

• Automatic ZFS snapshots
  Creates snapshots of a specified dataset before performing system upgrades.

• Snapshot description tagging
  Lets you set a custom autosnap:description for easy identification of snapshots.

• Automatic cleanup
  Deletes older snapshots beyond a user-defined limit to keep your snapshot history uncluttered.

• Pacman lock file handling
  Temporarily removes the Pacman lock file (/var/lib/pacman/db.lck) to prevent it from being included in a ZFS snapshot.

• Configurable behavior
  The /etc/zfs-autosnap.conf file allows you to enable or disable snapshot creation, set custom dataset names, limit the number of snapshots, and more.

Configuration

Edit /etc/zfs-autosnap.conf to match your preferences. For example:

• skipAutosnap (boolean) – Set to true to skip snapshot creation.
• dataset (string) – Your ZFS dataset name (default is ditana-root/ROOT/default).
• snapshotDescription (string) – Custom description for identifying snapshots.
• deleteSnapshots (boolean) – Enables or disables automatic deletion of older snapshots.
• maxSnapshots (integer) – Maximum number of autosnap snapshots to keep.

Additional Information

For details on listing ZFS snapshots and performing rollbacks, see the Ditana GNU/Linux Best Practices.

Acknowledgments

• Marko Gobin (gobonja on GitLab)
  Many thanks to Marko Gobin for creating timeshift-autosnap, which served as the foundation for this project.

Contributing

Contributions, suggestions, and bug reports are warmly welcomed! Feel free to open an issue or submit a pull request on GitHub.