suggestion for MxSnaphot

[dontknowlinux]

hello, not sure if its the correct subforum...
i was trying to use MX snapshot for the first time...well its the first time for everything, I'm new, like 2 hr experience.

looks like I have not enough space to do anything, so I was like " no problem I'll Snapshot personal and reinstall somewhere else but with more space"
well looks like nope. I write the ISO somewhere else (external USB) but it use a temp folder inside the root (I think tmp) so I'm stuck...
I was like "OK that's it, my experience end here and back to win10"
then I looked for maybe some workaround (OK now that I'm writing this, maybe one workaround could be some hardlink or symlink the folder on a different HD... no idea how )

aniway from github:
-o, --override-size
Skip calculating free space to see if the resulting ISO will fit

-w, --workdir <path>
Specify the path for the work directory

the work directory is the tmp folder or something similar right?

OK my suggestion is to add this 2 option in the GUI.
I'm not a programmer but looks super easy to do, and mxsnapshot is one of the first function that make mxlinux what it is...

PS: why the temp directory is not, as default, a subfolder in the same path of the final ISO? should be like this...
even 7zip, in windows, has this behavior and is annoying AF, it use s Temp and then copy the zip into the final path, its slower and doesn't make sense IMHO .

thank you.

[CharlesV]

Please post your QSI. ( MX Menu, Quick System Info, Copy for Forum, Paste here )

Because MX Snapshot makes a copy of your data, it can easily become too large if you have a small temp space or if you have a lot of data.

Edit: typo

[dontknowlinux]

yea, that's exactly one of the reason why you save elsewhere...
because you don't have enough space...
I think the 2 path option is necessary, one is already there, final ISO. it needs also the temp folder path ...now I don't need it anymore but... to me seems a nice little addition.

(I'm writing from the phone at the moment)

[CharlesV]

Well.. no. in my case (and in many cases), I have multiple partitions. so the partition with tmp on it is not the same as my home.

others with both root and home on the same partition it will work differently, but still tmp is used.

And tmp can be placed on different partitions too...

The issue is
1) how much available space where your tmp is located ?
2) how much data are you putting into the snapshot ?
__ and THEN
3) how much available space where your creating the snapshot.iso

[Adrian]

If you put the "work" (temp) directory on the same place where you save ISO you pretty much need twice the space of what you save. Splitting them allows you to use let's say /home for the work folder and use an external drive for the ISO (one example) -- also the requirements are different, if I remember correctly the work folder need to be a Linux partition (one that allows symlinks and mountpoints) the ISO folder can be on NTFS or exFAT (again if my memory serves me). Even more I usually check which one /tmp or /home are larger and then use that for the work directory (/home can be on a different partition than /tmp, and each of them can running out of space).

Admittedly this is not perfect how I do it, also it's hard to determine in advance exactly how much space I need because files compress differently and a compression factor is not guaranteed, I use a generic compression factor for each compression algorithm but there are ways to overshoot that.

The question remains, how much data you want to save and how much free space you have where you want to put it, if you launch the program from CLI (or check the log) it should list that in KB. If you provide that we can get an idea where it goes wrong -- or where you went wrong (trying to fit 5GB in a 2GB space won't work for example...)