So I took it upon myself to fork apt-btrfs-snapshot. It is a program that takes BTRFS snapshots after each apt transaction. I wanted it to use Snapper because Snapper has a GUI. Snapper also abstracts all of the functionality of working with BTRFS snapshots.

Here are some of the things its provides:

Management via a GUI

Rollbacks without mounting anything

A list of what files were changed and their filesizes

Tracking of what packages were installed

Pre and post snapshots

Automatic clean up

You can check it out on github:

https://github.com/agronick/apt-btrfs-snapper



64bit .deb

You can use a tool called gdebi to grab all the dependencies you need, which are only really Python and Ssnapper. If you want this done for you run

gdebi apt-btrfs-snapper_0.4.1_all.deb

Management Via a GUI

You can check out this post on installing Snapper GUI on Ubuntu. As you can see below you get a list of all your snapshots and in the bottom you can see what packages were installed. If you hold down control you can select two snapshots and open up the changes view to see what files were changed.

ROLLBACKS WITHOUT MOUNTING ANYTHING

To rollback to a previous version you just type:

sudo apt-btrfs-snapper --restore .

Replace <ID> with the snapshot ID or the snapshot name. This will delete, create, and modify your files to get your machine back in the state that it was in when that snapshot was created. You can then roll forward in time just by using a newer ID. You don’t need to restart anything.

A LIST OF FILES THAT WERE CHANGED AND THEIR FILESIZES

You can get a list of snapshots with:

sudo apt-btrfs-snapper list

You can then see what files were changed between two snapshots with:

sudo apt-btrfs-snapper diff

Here is a sample of that output:

c 391 B /usr/share/doc/maya-calendar-plugin-caldav/changelog.gz c 391 B /usr/share/doc/maya-calendar-plugin-google/changelog.gz c 391 B /usr/share/doc/maya-calendar/changelog.gz c 542 B /usr/share/doc/pantheon-files/changelog.gz c 246 B /usr/share/doc/pantheon-photos-common/changelog.Debian.gz c 246 B /usr/share/doc/pantheon-photos/changelog.Debian.gz c 854 B /usr/share/doc/plank/changelog.Debian.gz

You can use snapper itself to restore an individual file to a specific state.

Tracking of what packages were installed

apt-btrfs-snapper saves the names of all the packages that were installed in the user data of each snapshot. The best place to view this is in snapper-gui. It can be viewed in the snapper command line tools but it is hard to read. You can see this in the bottom pane in the screenshot above.

Pre and post snapshots

apt-btrfs-snapper takes a snapshot before and after each transaction. They are grouped together in snapper-gui. You can easily see what changes took place between the two snapshots.

Automatic clean up

One of the best parts about snapper are the clean up algorithms built into it. apt-btrfs-snapper simply uses the configuration settings set for the number cleanup algorithm which is part of snapper.

So check it out. Its stable, works great, and makes taking and manipulating BTRFS snapshots a lot easier.