How to set up Timeshift in Fedora?

Now onto the fun part (yay! But this is not Arch). In this section, I will show you how to setup up Timeshift in Fedora with a BTRFS file system.

Step 1 Booting into USB

Boot into the installation media

Step 2 Language

Select language and hit continue.

Step 3 Keyboard layout

Choose your keyboard layout and time zone on the next screen.

Step 4 Destination

Click on the installation destination

Step 5 Advanced Custom

Click on the radio button titled “Advanced Custom (Blivet-GUI)” and click done.

We can see that we have 25 GB available on our hard disk, we will have to partition this into 3 partitions, i.e. boot partition, EFI partition and root partition which would have our two sub-volumes root and home.

We are not going to create a swap partition, as Fedora uses Zram instead of Swap on disk.

Step 6 EFI partition

We will first create the EFI partition, for that, click on the plus icon

• Enter the size as 600 MiB
• Select the file system as “EFI system partition”
• Enter the mount point as “/boot/efi”

Step 7 Boot partition

Now we will create the boot partition. Click on free space and click on the plus icon once again.

• Enter the size as 1024 Mib
• Select the file system as ext4
• Enter the mount point as “/boot”

Step 8 BTRFS partition

Now we will allocate the remaining space for our BTRFS partition.

• Enter the remaining size
• Select the file system as BTRFS
• Encrypt your hard drive, this is optional but recommended, especially for portable devices like laptops where you always have the risk of your data getting into a third party’s hands because of it getting stolen or lost. This also holds true if your laptop ever malfunctions and you give it to repair, encrypting your data will ensure that the technician is unable to access it. You can follow the following steps to encrypt your laptop:
  • Check the “Encrypt” checkbox
  • Leave “Encryption type” and “Sector size” untouched.
  • Enter your passphrase which is strong but easy to remember(you will have to enter each time you boot your computer).
  • Re-enter the passphrase

• Hit OK.

Step 9 Creating subvolumes

Now we will have to create the BTRFS sub-volumes for root and home.

Creating root subvolume

To create the root subvolume-

• Select the primary BTRFS partition which was created and hit the plus icon.
• Now enter the name as “@”
• And, enter the mount point as “/”

Creating Home subvolume

To create the home subvolume –

• Once again select the BTRFS partition and hit the plus icon.
• Enter name as “@home”
• And mount point as “/home”

Step 10 Almost done

Click on done and accept all the changes.

Step 11 Let’s begin

Install Fedora.

If you truly are a geek at heart, you’ve ended up with a broken system at least once in your life and yes while it can be enjoyable to troubleshoot the issues and correct them, more often than not you will simply be reinstalling your entire OS and its never that fun at all having to go through all that tedium – downloading and installing all your apps, resetting configuration, signing into all your accounts; it’s gonna eat up your entire weekend.

So, what’s the solution?

Well, you could just not break your system(yeah, right), or just install Timeshift.

In this article, you will learn how to set up and install Time Shift on Fedora with BTRFS disk format.