[dmitrygr]

> similar to the System Restore feature in Windows and the Time Machine tool in Mac OS

This makes no sense! System Restore is a useless wart that just wastes time making "restore points" at every app/driver install and can rarely (if ever) produce a working system when used to "restore" anything. It does not back up user data at all. Time Machine is a whole-system backup solution that seems to work quite well and does back up user data.

To me the quoted statement might as well read "a tool similar to knitting needles (in hobby shops) and dremels (in machine shops)"

Reading their description further, it seems like they are implementing something similar to TimeMachine (within the confines of what linux makes possible), and not at all like "System Restore". This seems sane as this implements something that is actually useful. They, sadly, seem to gloss over what the consequences are of using non-btrfs FS with this tool, only mentioning that btrfs is needed for byte-exact snapshots. They do not mention what sort of byte-inexactness ext4 users should expect...

[magicalhippo]

They're talking about the Volume Shadow Copy Service[1], which effectively provides snapshots[2] of the filesystem.

Which files are part of a shadow copy is determined by the one creating a shadow copy, so it could include user data.

You can view and access the files in a shadow copy using ShadowExplorer[3] if you don't have the pro versions.

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/fil...

[2]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/vss/the-vss-...

[3]: https://www.shadowexplorer.com/

[nijave]

I believe System Restore takes a registry backup and can recover from a bad driver install but it's been years since I used it last. I think just about anything System Restore does can be replicated by "just fixing it" in Safe Mode but I think System Restore is geared for less technical folks.

Newer versions of Windows have File History to backup user data (I don't think they have an integrated system/file solution quite like Time Machine though).

However it makes some sense to keep system/user data separate. You don't want to lose your doc edits because you happened to have a bad driver upgrade at the same time. Likewise, you don't want to roll your entire system back to get an old version of a doc.

Time Machine is trivial to implement (without the UI) with disk snapshots (that's what it does--store disk snapshots to an external disk)

[twodave]

My main use of system restore was to return to a “clean” install + just the bare minimum installs I needed back when windows was more likely to atrophy over time. I agree it is mostly useless today.