Clarification on deletion policy

[ironhak]

From what I understand creating a comment on an automatic snapshot will make so that it'll not get deleted on future automatic cleanup.

This "feature" is not documented on man pages or anywhere else. It would be good to know from the start that when commeninting you're making a snapshot "permament".

Thanks

[ygerlach]

Good point.
The code that is responsible for this behaviour is here:

timeshift/src/Core/SnapshotRepo.vala

Line 681 in a4e0759

if (snap.description.strip().length > 0){ continue; } // don't delete snapshots with comments

Maybe this should be an option?

[ironhak]

I think it's essential to have this feature (at least for me), specially on Arch or rolling distros.

I think we just need a way to tell the user that this is a thing.

[ygerlach]

Idea: we mark all user created snapshots with a new tag: "K (Keep)" - so user snapshots are never deleted. But we allow the user to add and remove this tag to every snapshot he likes. The normal "O (On Demand)" tag should then be ignored, when checking if a snapshot should be kept.

[ironhak]

Idea: we mark all user created snapshots with a new tag: "K (Keep)" - so user snapshots are never deleted. But we allow the user to add and remove this tag to every snapshot he likes. The normal "O (On Demand)" tag should then be ignored, when checking if a snapshot should be kept.

This can be already achieved by simply adding a comment. I think a simple pop-up or disclaimer in man-pages would be more than enough :)

[ygerlach]

This can be already achieved by simply adding a comment. I think a simple pop-up or disclaimer in man-pages would be more than enough :)

i want to separate the "this snapshot can be auto deleted" logic from the "this snapshot was created by the user" logic. Currently self created snapshots are never deleted. I would like to give the user the opportunity to do something like "i want at most x on demand snapshots - auto delete older once" but still keep important snapshots. I think this is important to many users, as some scripts auto create snapshots as ondemand, making it impossible for timeshift to decide which snapshot is safe to delete and which one is not.

Maybe timeshift should provide a "Update"/"System Change" Tag for such scripts. Anyways, i think we need some kind of new tag for users with auto snapshot hooks.