Using NILFS2 without root

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NILFS2 is a fairly obscure filesystem that has a very cool feature derived from its design: constant snapshotting.

But is seems that very few people use it in a desktop setting, and thus few tools exist to use it, compared to BTRFS or LVM snapshots.

Using it to create and mount snapshots requires root access, and is not practical.

I created a binary and helper script to facilitate the everyday use of a NILFS2 filesystem.

GitHub - JeanRibes/nilfs2-mounter: mount NILFS2 snapshots without sudo¹

Installing

There is a fedora RPM but admittedly I am not very good at packaging.

To use on another distro, run `make install`.

Security

The Go binary requires the `CAP_SYS_ADMIN` to mount and create snapshots.

At 67 lines of code you can review it yourself !

It does not use any external dependencies, only the Golang standard library.

The binary can only mount read-only snapshots, and does not allow to delete snapshots.

Usage

There are 3 .desktop files:

• Create snapshot
• Mount snapshot
• Unmount all snapshots

The Mount snapshot will open a terminal window that runs `fzf`. You can filter with the keyboard and select with Enter or even click.

The snapshot will open in you preferred file explorer.

Beware, the snapshots are read-only. They are mounted at `$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/nilfs2-mounter/snapshots`.


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Choosing a snapshot to mount

{.foo}

Warning

I am not responsible for your files. A NILFS2 snapshot is not a backup: in the event of a filesystem corruption you could lose all your data including the snapshots.

Additionally, I would advise against making NILFS2 your root filesystem: like BRTFS, when it gets full it is not so easy to free some space. So you should only use it on an additional drive.

🔗 [1]: GitHub - JeanRibes/nilfs2-mounter: mount NILFS2 snapshots without sudo

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