A detailed look at Ubuntu’s new experimental ZFS installer
Although there isn't any support built into Eoan's apt package manager for automatically taking snapshots yet, we can demonstrate a snapshot—oops—rollback moment manually. In the above gallery, first we take a ZFS snapshot. Eoan has split our root filesystem into tons of little datasets (more on that later), so we use the -r option for zfs snapshot to recursively take snapshots throughout the entire tree.
Now that we've insured ourselves against mistakes, we do something we're going to regret. For the purposes of this demo, we're just removing Firefox—but we could really recover from anything up to and including an rm -rf --no-preserve-root / this way with a little extra legwork. After removing Firefox, we need to roll back our snapshots to restore the system to its original condition.
Since the root filesystem is scattered through a bunch of individual datasets, we need to roll them all back individually. Although this is a pain for the casual user without additional tooling, it does make it possible to do more granular restore operations if we're feeling picky—like rolling back the root filesystem without rolling back /home. Ubuntu will undoubtedly eventually have tooling to make this easier, but for the moment, we do a bit of sysadmin-fu and pipe zfs list to grep to awk to xargs, oh my.
The command line acrobatics might have been obnoxious, but the rollback itself was instantaneous, and Firefox has returned. It still doesn't work quite right, though, due to orphaned filehandles—we rolled back a live mounted root filesystem, which is kind of a cowboy thing to do. To make things entirely right, a reboot is necessary—but after the reboot, everything's the way it once was, and without the need to wait through any lengthy Windows Restore Point-style groveling over the filesystem.
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