I Made My First Guide on GitHub!

This goes back a couple of weeks now since it was completed, but I’ve been updating it with incremental improvements to ensure quality and accuracy since then. This was born from accidentally nuking a system upgrade from Debian 12 to 13, but then taking the opportunity to fresh install without an ext4 filesystem, and use something that can recover a botched system more easily. Lemons to Lemonade!

The main goal of the guide is to give a detailed walkthrough of setting up the new stable branch Debian 13 with:

• a manually sub-volumed btrfs filesystem,
• the application Timeshift to facilitate automatically scheduled snapshot creation
• Grub-Btrfs so the snapshots are readily available in your boot menu for easy rollback to previous system states.

There are many more options that you can do to facilitate btrfs snapshot creation, even automatic ones taken before every app install/update/remove using scripts for Timeshift or Snapper, so I hope to dig into those further in the future. In my mind, the ultimate setup to cover all bases will be using Snapper for the automatic snapshots creation for every app install/update/remove using the aforementioned scripts, in conjunction with Timeshift using rsync to schedule complete backups to an additional hard drive.

The GitHub repository is here: Debian-13-BTRFS-Install-Guide

If anyone wants to contribute, you’re more than welcome to submit a pull request!