Restore Your Linux System to Earlier Date

with TimeShift
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By Damien – Posted on in Linux

In Windows, there is a System Restore feature that takes a snapshot of your system at regular
interval and allows you to restore the system back to an earlier date when it crashes. In Mac, the
popular Time Machine feature can do the job as well. What about Linux? What solution do you
have?
We have previously covered BackInTime and TimeVault that can take a snapshot of your system at
regular interval. TimeShift is yet another backup application for Linux that is easy to use and allows
you to easily roll back to a previous state.

What makes TimeShift different from BackInTime is that it only backup and protect system files
and settings. It doesn’t handle your data and document (you will need another backup application
for that, and we strongly recommended using Dropbox or Ubuntu One). This ensures that your
personal files remains unchanged when you restore your system to an earlier date.
Note: TimeShift makes use of rsync to get the work done. While you can easily make use of rsync to
accomplish the same task, this provides a simple to use interface so you can get things done easier
and faster.

Installation
Like most third-party applications, installing it is very easy. Open a terminal and run the following
commands:
sudo apt-add-repository -y ppa:teejee2008/ppa
sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install timeshift

Usage
When you run the application, all you need to do is to click the “Backup” button and it will take the
first snapshot of your system.

The default location is “/timeshift” (located in the root folder), and that is why it will prompt you
for user permission when you open the application.
To restore the system to a previous state, simply select the snapshot that you want to restore to and
click the Restore button.
It wouldn’t be useful if there is no option for you to schedule the backup and let it run
automatically. Under the Settings, you can turn the “Schedule snapshots” feature on and configure it
to run on regular interval.
There is also an Auto-remove feature to make sure you won’t run low on storage space.
The last Advanced tab is where you can include or exclude files to be backed up.
Conclusion
As you can see, TimeShift is a very simple application. There are only a few Settings that you can
configure and it doesn’t come with plenty of feature. However, for what it is supposed to do, it did
its job well. Sometime, a simple application is all you need to save you from the devastating system
crash.