SUSE Lesson 19 BTRFS and Snapper

Here we will take a visit into the world of a newer file system, BTRFS. Pronounced Butter FS. One of the feature of btrfs is snapshots, being able to revert changes made to configuration of user data. If the root file system is btrfs then in openSUSE 12.x and SUSE 11 SP2 then yast and zypper will create automatic snapshots before and after changes.

Rather than have complete snapshots of the root file-system which can include most of the file system, btrfs allows for sub volumes. These are directories that are on a btrfs partition but where you wish for separate BTRFS configurations. The directories remain as part of the root file system but are not part of the snapshots for the root file-system unless you want them to be.

This makes sense especially for directories like /tmp and /var which will contain many changes but you may want on the root file system.
The only snapshot configuration in place is for the root file system but we can create our own configs for other btrfs file systems and sub-volumes

		snapper list-configs
		snapper -c home create-config /home

The video steps you through snapper and btrfs and how to rollback changes