Installs from before the Snapper setup was normalized ran hourly
timeline snapshots. Newer configs stopped creating them but never
deleted the existing ones, and number cleanup skips snapshots marked
Cleanup=timeline, so they sit there forever: one machine installed from
the 2026-05-11 ISO had accumulated 592 of them, silently pinning 219 GB
of disk. The limine-snapper-sync limit-mismatch warning that would have
surfaced this is disabled by default since the notifier migration.
Delete leaked timeline snapshots in batches of 20 (a single mass delete
can die on a DBus timeout partway through), and only when
TIMELINE_CREATE="no" so anyone who deliberately re-enabled timeline
snapshotting keeps their setup untouched.
The drain is best effort: a batch that fails is skipped rather than
aborting the migration run and everything queued behind it, since the
next run re-lists whatever is left.
The stock Arch updatedb.conf interacts badly with Omarchy's Btrfs
layout in both directions:
- Snapper snapshots under /.snapshots are nested subvolumes reached by
plain directory traversal, so updatedb indexes the entire system once
per snapshot. On machines that accumulated snapshots this means
multi-hour updatedb runs at full CPU, gigabytes of RAM, and a
multi-gigabyte plocate.db (observed: 18 GB db, 7.5 h runs at 96% CPU
with 592 snapshots; 43 MB and ~1 min after the fix).
- PRUNE_BIND_MOUNTS="yes" treats Btrfs subvolume mounts like /home as
bind mounts, so locate finds nothing in home directories at all.
Configure updatedb.conf at install time and migrate existing installs,
then rebuild the index in the background. Both settings are matched
tolerantly and appended when absent, so a hand-edited updatedb.conf is
fixed rather than silently skipped.
Martin Bastien