So, recently, I bought an nvme ssd to replace the very old ssd I have on my laptop. I don’t know what the non-nvme is called. It shows as “sda” on the system. Anyway, doubled the storage. The new drive is an nvme WD black SN770. I have the same one running just fine on an optiplex dell mini running endeavourOS. Zero issues. I like to separate home and root partitions and have btrfs on root for snapshots. So, thinking it would behave the same on the laptop, I put the new drive in the laptop and did the same partitioning. Installed Fedora this time, since I like gnome on the laptop and plasma on desktop. Everything went fine. Laptop was responsive and all until I was done and closed the lid. Came back a while later to use it again, black screen and nothing revives it. No key combo or anything works except holding down the power button to shut it off. This kept happening every single time I closed and opened the lid after a while. Thought it might be the distro/DE. Removed fedora and slapped endeavourOS with plasma on it. Same removed happens now. Black screen every time I open the lid after a suspend. So, I decided removed it, let me juse use ext4 since it happens on every distro. Removed btrfs and used ext4 on all partions, and now this issue never happens. Not even once. Is this a known issue with btrfs and nvmes? Do they not like each other? Just wanted to share this little dilemma I had to deal with the last couple of days.
Well, first of all, snapshots are not backups and should not be relied upon as such. They don’t protect you from a gamut of risks such as filesystem corruption, hardware failures, etc.
As far as backups, basically you can take your pick. Personally I use Duplicacy to back up my workstations to my file/media server, then from there my most critical data is backed up off site to secured cloud storage.
Timeshift is another popular tool.
There are many options out there.
You’re right, snapshots don’t save you all the time like an actual back up. Yesterday I backed up the whole system to an external drive via Pika. I feel so much better about it. I do have a nas, so I might throw a copy of the back there, too. Thank you for explaining things, I really appreciate it.
While snapshots are not backups, they are very helpful when making backup because they are atomic and can also be transferred to another drive with btrfs send/receive.