On Fri, Aug 7, 2015 at 1:56 PM, Diogene Laerce me_buss777@yahoo.fr wrote:
Hi,
After a sad experience with a system update, I would like to ask if there is a software on Fedora or more generally on Linux which would allow me to make a complete snapshot of the system ?
Something as easy of use as the snapshot feature in VirtualBox would be great.. But near would do as well.
Well, VirtualBox snapshots have an equivalent in virt-manager that are as easy to use. But if you're talking about bare metal, no there is nothing even remotely approaching that level of ease for rollbacks yet.
The closest it comes is choosing Btrfs for installation (you can use something else for /home if you want). The root subvolume on Btrfs can then be snapshot before you do a dnf update, update the snapshot's copy of fstab, and if things go bad you can change the rootflags=subvol=<subvolname> boot parameter to that of the snapshot name. But this assumes some Btrfs knowledge, which at least is not nearly as esoteric and complicated like the rabbit hole that is LVM thin volume snapshots. But that's also an option if you're at least semi-comfortable with LVM.
Another option, which is still maturing and really intended now only as a platform for deploying containers, is Fedora Atomic (rpm-ostree). This is really where rollbacks are at, because updates are atomic, and it deals with all the gory bootloader details. The tea leaves suggests this is the direction for a future Workstation product that can do what you describe.