Installed Raspbian and can't backup with Timeshift

Question

I haven't seen this issue posted anywhere else. It's not the same issue. Basically, I'm installing Raspbian with a fresh install. I boot into it and am immediately low on disk space. Here's why:

df -h
Filesystem    Size  Used  Avail  Use%  Mounted on
/dev/root     15G   3.3G  11G    24%   /
..... a bunch of other tiny partitions
/dev/mmcblk0p1 44M  4.0k  44M    1%    /boot

I can install applications just fine. But I can't create a backup with Timeshift. It's trying to back up to my /boot partition and not my root partition. Why?

How is the disk space low? You appear to have 76% (11G of 15G) available — Bra1n, Dec 17 '20 at 16:51
And it looks like you have 99% of /boot available. I think your problem lies elsewhere. — Elliot Alderson, Dec 17 '20 at 16:52
I can't select that partition. Timeshift just shows my smaller partition. — ImBadAtCoding, Dec 17 '20 at 16:56
I guess its looking for another drive and thinks the FAT vs EXT formatted partitions are two physical drives. Seen this under Ubuntu where you could only back up to the USB stick (FAT32) no matter how the internal drive was partitioned if they where all EXT 'drives'. — , Dec 17 '20 at 17:00
I use raspibackup for my Pi backups https://github.com/framps/raspiBackup — Bra1n, Dec 17 '20 at 19:14
You use an old Raspbian image with a FAT boot partition of only 44 MB. You should flash an up to date Raspberry Pi OS with a boot partition of 253 MB. — Ingo, Dec 18 '20 at 10:13
Oh weird. I'll try that. I used NOOBS as my bootstrapper. It was a fresh install, but maybe the newest version of Raspberry Pi wasn't in there. — ImBadAtCoding, Dec 19 '20 at 07:11

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 25 '21 at 07:55

As the man page suggests, try adding --snapshot-device /dev/root, or set backup_device_uuid in /etc/timeshift.json to configure it for your system.

Side note: /dev/root is a rather odd name, your root filesystem should be on /dev/mmcblk0p2 on an official Pi OS image, or /dev/mmcblk0p6 if you use NOOBS.

Installed Raspbian and can't backup with Timeshift

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