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I am running Mint 19.3, I need to restore my broken system. I booted up with a live usb and installed timeshift. When I pick a snapshot and click "restore" I get, "Error, Failed to mount devices". I have boot drive and home mounted. I tried several snapshots.

Rich Dell
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I am probably a bit late and my solution only worked for my Pop!_OS 20.10 (Ubuntu) build with the rsync method, but i wanted this answered. You first need a working fresh installation of your system, but you can make it work from a Live-USB.

First, Timeshift creates "info.json" in the directory of the snapshot. In it the value of the key "sys-uuid" needs to be changed to the UUID of your current system disk (this seems to be optional, for consistensy it will stay. Main problem is the second one).

Second, there is "/etc/fstab" in the snapshots "localhost" directory. You need to replace its content with the content of your own fstab file (that was created with your fresh system), so Timeshift knows which drives to target (even though you specify this in the restore process, dont know what causes this). If you had any special partitions set up (e.g. home and root on different drives), make sure to set up the fresh system the exact same way you set up the old one (might confuse Timeshift elsewise).

You can do this from a Live-USB if there is a new valid fstab file already created for the current hardware setup (or you made a valid one yourself). This is easiest done by installing a fresh system and the rest of the steps can be done from the USB easily.

Then you should be able to restore like normally.

bigbluedeer
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