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I wanted to install timeshift on a headless server. Unfortunately it depends on a mass of GUI that I really don't want polluting a server (for example x11-common etc).

Is there either a way to install it without it's GUI, or an alternative that does the same thing. I've been using rsnapshot (fine for what it does) but I'm looking for a system restore utility rather than data backup.

David
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3 Answers3

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Unfortunately, although it can completely run from the terminal as a CLI application, timeshift depends on libgtk-3-0 which in turn depends on all sorts of GUI/display server(both X11 and Wayland) related packages and unless those dependencies are satisfied, it won't be possible to install timeshift(at least the linked package from the official repositories).

You can always use rsync directly as most of those backup applications including timeshift and rsnapshot are merely/mainly front-ends for it ... Please see extra related information here as well.

Raffa
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This is not true, you can install timeshift on Ubuntu 18 server in CLI, using the direct Ubuntu20 version but! The issue / downside is, when restoring back to a snapshot it may not fully do it, and may make the server unbootable. Experiment it, see if it works for you

download the Ubuntu20 from https://pkgs.org/download/timeshift

wget https://ubuntu.pkgs.org/22.04/ubuntu-universe-amd64/timeshift_21.09.1-1_amd64.deb.html

then

sudo dpkg -i timeshift_21.09.1-1_amd64.deb

system will complain about missing depencies so install those by :

sudo apt install -f

then retry install the deb package

sudo dpkg -i timeshift_21.09.1-1_amd64.deb

timeshift will install, but remember the warnings.

Android Enthusiast
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This might blow your mind, but if you're running headless servers you can STILL run GUI applications FROM that server. I'd like to introduce you to a little command called "export DISPLAY=yourworkstation'sipaddress:0.0" You DO need to be running an x server of some kind so way easier if your workstation is a linux desktop. Having said that, I just recently hacked the bejesus out of and repurposed a ubiquity gen 1 security key, and have timeshift installed, and launch the gui to do backups.

Tom Jarvis
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