Not understanding Boot Environments
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Hello,
yesterday, I felt the urgent need, to update to the current 25.07 RC.
A boot environment snapshot was taken automatically.
Upgrade worked fine and after reboot, the 25.07 RC was working fine - including all updated packages.
However, when I later attempted a rollback, I went to Boot Environment and selected via the "play button" the old snapshot.
It rebooted to 24.11 but the packages seemed to be still the packages from 25.07. It was a hassle to downgrade them again to 24.11 status. It seems that the selected upgrade branch was still selected to 25.07.
What should be part of a snapshot?- Full OS?
- Full config?
- Full packages?
- Selected upgrade branch?
- ...?
Thanks in advance for any insights – much appreciated!
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@renegade said in Not understanding Boot Environments:
upgrade branch was still selected to 25.07
Even if, you select the right branch and are good, nothing else to do or downgrade.
I too think it is not as easy to get, what it is doing but once you learned about snapshots and the package system in pfSense, there is no problem. -
@renegade reverting should not need to reinstall packages so not sure what happened. A BE is basically “stop writing to ‘this disk’ and start another.” Loosely.
The (>) button is one reboot: https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/backup/zfsbe/gui.html#selecting-boot-environments-in-the-gui
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Mmm that^.
However what you will see is that after booting back into the 24.11 BE the update branch will still be set to 25.07-RC because that was the last thing that was done before the upgrade took the snapshot. So if you plan to run 24.11 for some time after reverting you would need to set the update branch back to 24.11 in that BE before doing any package operations.
