Snapper For Linux

Snapper is a freely distributed and open source command-line utility that allows users to manage filesystem snapshots under any GNU/Linux operating system. It supports the Btrfs filesystem, as well as LVM (Logical Volume Manager).

After creating snapshots with the Snapper tool, you will be able to compare, restore and delete them. In other words, it’s like the Time Machine application for the Mac OS X operating system, but without a graphical user interface (GUI).

Snapper has been designed in such a way that it allows regular users and system administrators alike to view older versions of the files stored on a drive and revert changes made to them. Basically, you will be able to “travel” back in time to compare files, similar to the Time Machine application for the Mac OS X operating system.

To install the Snapper software on your GNU/Linux operating system, you will have to download the latest release of the software, save the archive on your Home directory, extract its contents using an archive manager utility.

Open a terminal emulator application and navigate to the location of the extracted archive files using the ‘cd’ command (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/snapper-0.2.4), where you will have to run the ‘./configure && make’ command to configure and compile the program, followed by the ‘sudo make install’ command to install it system wide.

After installation, execute the ‘snapper --help’ command to view available options, as well as the usage message. These will allow you to suppress normal output, increase verbosity, operate without D-Bus, set the name of the configuration file in use, specify the table style, display times and dates in ISO and UTC formats, the type of snapshots to list, and type for snapshot.