@Benjamin,

Hello,

I’m sorry to hear about the trouble you’re facing. Yes, you can definitely restore your system using Timeshift from your external drive backup.

After you install the new OS:

1. Install Timeshift.
2. Connect your external drive.
3. Launch Timeshift and choose ‘Restore‘.
4. Select the appropriate backup from your external drive and follow the on-screen instructions.

This should restore your system to the state it was in when you made the backup. Always ensure you have all your important data backed up before proceeding.

Wishing you a smooth recovery process. Have a great weekend!”

I’ve messed up my system big time. Trying to install pipewire I accidentally erased some part of the core file and nothing work – Not even cinnamon desktop. NOTHING.

My question is if there’s any possibility to restore my system FROM TIMESHIFT once I install the new OS. I’ve saved the backup in an external drive and there it is.

Hope you can help me. Have a good weekend!

It is best to simply use rsync.

It has saved me lots of time because I like to test software that doesn’t always exist in the distribution, modify the distro files and generally hack around with things. I do not stay only within the systems default repositories. I start with a nice distro and I seek out the remainder of what I need and if its not available I figure out how to make it myself. So I have broken the system quite a bit during testing. sometimes there is just software that you want to use and would prefer not to wait for others to prepare it for you. For instance I installed ocenaudio on my Linux Mint 19.1 Cinnamon there was a deb package so I didn’t care if it was not in the repository as long as my system could be made to meet the dependency requirements without me needing to remove something either the system needs or I want or need specifically. Often though I run into software that is not even released with deb packages but they tend to give enough info for me to collect the required dependencies and see if it will work or can be made to work on my system. I may compile from source code or pull from PPA it all depends on the specifics. But one thing for sure is that Timeshift has been more than valuable to me. I installed a slew of special USB development packages one day not long ago. Well I did it in haste because I was being hasty and in a hurry. What happened? I lost my systems USB access meaning the system I was on could not use the touch screen, mouse, or keyboard. I was attempting to hack a method to get a mac ati usb tv card to work with linux. I will continue to see if I can because the system can see it so I will try. I will need to probably write a driver to make it work. I have gone against the grain and used timeshift to back up my entire filesystem including home and root home before it has those options.
I do not recommend doing that. At the moment I have roughly 20-21 20gb snapshot and am getting ready to choose which to reduce. This go around I am using this much space and not backing up home but just keeping a rolling backup for testing. It would take much more space than this system has at the moment to back up my system with the settings I am using. But I must say it has kept me from needing to reinstall or lose modifications and software installs.

I feel comfortable now with this software’s ability to perform to my expectations. I will be improving on my backup scheme by augmenting my plan to include scripts or programs that rsync all of my files in the same fashion then compress the files and store in iso format to be burned. Once burned to disc the backup files on drive all but the latest can be deleted.

I am doing all of the testing now because I want a list of everything I want in my system when I compile from source a new Gentoo system distro for my uses. That system will have timeshift and the augmentations I speak of regarding non system personal file backup. I am thinking of using some sort of script to detect the best compression format based on the file format being compressed. As far as text files that is likely to be a PAQ6-PAQ8 algorithm based compression. But as far as video and audio I want lossess compression such as FLAC for audio albums or collections but I may choose to use 320kbps MP3. Video Will be between h.264 & h.265 mkv or mp4 I like mkv usually. I may wind up writing scripts for the process of scanning these files organizing based on a list of criteria and then choosing the setup based on this info.

As far as files generated by the user it should be easy enough to get an adequate system in place.

The video process and audio process I will have to write or find scripts which pipe data to each other to formulate an adequate scan and then create an on the fly configuration to use to run all the processes in the proper order.

I realize I have given more data then you requested and apologize but I figured you may find the data interesting or potentially useful.