Fearless Arch Experience: A Guide To Automatic System Backups

A simple guide to creating automatic system backups on Arch Linux.

One of the most notorious aspects of daily driving Arch Linux is the fear of breaking your system. The fear of losing all your configurations, themes, and scripts is a nightmare for any ricer. However, I am here to tell you that with the help of rsync and timeshift, or any other backup tool, you can easily create a backup of your system and restore it in case of a disaster. In fact, I recently had a system crash and was able to restore my system back to its previous state without any data loss. In this blog, I will guide you through the process of creating an automatic setup to backup your system using timeshift.

Automatic System Backups Setup

Step 1: Installation of timeshift

Install timeshift using the following command or using the pacman helper of your choice:

sudo pacman -S timeshift

To verify the installation, run the following command:

sudo timeshift --version

Step 2: Periodic Backups

You can choose to use any GUI tool or the command line to create backups.

Using GUI Tools

If you use the timeshift GUI tool, you can easily configure the backup settings and configure the backup location and backup schedule.

Step 3: Adding Pacman Hooks

To ensure that your system is backed up before any system upgrade, you can add a pacman hook. Create a new file in /etc/pacman.d/hooks/backup.hook and add the following script:

# https://man.archlinux.org/man/alpm-hooks.5

[Trigger]
Operation = Upgrade
Type = Package
Target = *

[Action]
Description = pre-upgrade rsync backup
Depends = timeshift
When = PreTransaction
Exec = /bin/sh -c "/etc/pacman.d/hooks.bin/backup.sh"
AbortOnFail

Create a new file in /etc/pacman.d/hooks.bin/backup.sh and add the following script:

#!/bin/bash
# Path to backup folder. Usually in the form of <path>/timeshift/snapshots-ondemand
find "path/to/backup" -mmin -10 | grep $(date +%Y-%m-%d)
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
    echo "timeshift backup canceled, time threshold not met"
else
    sudo /usr/bin/timeshift --create --comments "timeshift-pacman-hook-snapshot"
fi
exit

This script will create a backup before any system upgrade if a backup was not created in the last 10 minutes.

System Recovery

In case of a system crash, you can easily restore your system using the backup created. To restore your system, boot into a live USB and mount the root partition to /mnt, boot partition to /mnt/boot, and the backup partition to a folder of your choice. Then run the following command:

Delete all files from /mnt/boot

rm -rf /mnt/boot/*

Restore the backup

# Use the path to the previous backup, usually in the form of <path>/timeshift/shnapshots/2022-09-15_18-00-01
path_to_previous_backup="/path/to/previous_backup"
rsync -avxPAX --exclude="lost+found" "$path_to_previous_backup/localhost/boot" /mnt/boot

Move the files into /mnt/boot

mv /mnt/boot/boot/* /mnt/boot
rm -rf /mnt/boot/boot

Great, you have successfully restored your system. Now reboot your system and you should be good to go.