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Ubuntu Timeshift and SSD Wear

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German_EE:
Anyone out there who has an SSD in your system and you're running either Ubuntu Linux or Linux Mint please read this.

A program called 'Timeshift' is enabled by default and when in use it takes automatic backups of your hard drive. Normally backups are a good thing but in this case a) the backups are stored on the same drive making them useless and b) the drive wear when using this program is terrifying, it can kill an SSD in six months if daily snapshots are enabled.

So, please think carefully if you still want to use this program. If you don't want to use it then going to Update Manager / Edit / System Snapshots /Settings /Schedule will let you turn off all backup requests, If you do want to use Timeshift then make sure you backup to spinning rust rather than an SSD.

wraper:

--- Quote from: German_EE on November 02, 2019, 07:12:49 pm ---b) the drive wear when using this program is terrifying, it can kill an SSD in six months if daily snapshots are enabled.

--- End quote ---
BS, you need to rewrite a whole size of SSD hundreds of times to even closely come to possibility of failure due to wear.

Monkeh:
Not only is it not useless (oops, accidentally made a modification you didn't want or deleted a file? restore it!), but to claim it can wear out an SSD is nonsense.

Timeshift uses either hardlinks or filesystem-level snapshots - in both cases effectively no data (only a bit of metadata) is written unless a file is changed after the snapshot.

German_EE:
The system I repaired last night had 220 Gb of files in the Timeshift directory, this was on a 250 Gb Samsung drive that had died after six months and was now read only. Analysis of the SMART data showed that about 20 Gb a day was written to the drive and about the same amount was deleted.

wraper:

--- Quote from: German_EE on November 03, 2019, 08:40:54 am ---The system I repaired last night had 220 Gb of files in the Timeshift directory, this was on a 250 Gb Samsung drive that had died after six months and was now read only. Analysis of the SMART data showed that about 20 Gb a day was written to the drive and about the same amount was deleted.

--- End quote ---
20GB/day for 250GB drive means it should be good for at least 10 years.

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