WetGeek Thank you again, and here goes my first question, please. (I just looked up Restic on the Internet, but need more time to understand what and how it does everything.)

My aim is to create system snapshots before changing something in the root that could potentially play havoc to the system. I would do it prior to the next Solus weekly update. The Home partition is already backed up with rsync to an external drive.
This is the question: can Restic be actually used to make system snapshots the same way as Timeshift?

      alfisya Thank you Alfisya. In the Solus repo I've found only some of the prerequisite files that are listed in the new Timeshift development page. Can you suggest where I can find them and, possibly, tell me where they should be placed in the root? (I a Linux beginner...)

      Thank you

          MarioC can Restic be actually used to make system snapshots the same way as Timeshift?

          No, it works a little differently. Restic takes advantage of the fact that Solus editions only take a few minutes to install. And in the script that I provided, the first part of doing a backup is to create a list of all the packages that have been installed that are not part of the initial installation. That list, called InstalledPackages, is saved to your /home directory, where all the rest of your things are (or should be).

          So the process of doing a restore is like this:
          (1) Install the edition of Solus that you choose to use. And install restic.
          (2) Do an eopkg update.
          (3) Restore the backup you want with Restic. This will also restore the InstalledPackages list of added software.
          (4) Use the Restic Restore command (eopkg it InstalledPackages) that will restore all those packages.

          This all actually doesn't take much time at all. And by starting with a new OS installation, you have the option to change things that you've thought of after the initial installation. You might want to increase the size of your swap partition, for example, so you can hibernate your computer when you're not using it. (That's a very good idea.) You might even want to install a different edition of Solus the next time.

          The end result is that you get a clean OS, freshly updated, and your /home directory is restored, along with all the packages that were installed since your initial OS installation. That is, your computer will be exactly where it was when you made the backup. (You might need to change some settings again, but that's pretty trivial.)

            MarioC Sorry if this sounds rude. You are building/compiling it yourself, so be aware that whatever happened it is your responsibilty.
            That being said, the documentation is pretty clear of what is needed (as in installed). Those prerequisites should be installed before building/compiling. You should install system.devel packages with eopkg it -c system.devel. You can search all those prerequisites with eopkg sr [package name], do note that the package name might be different from the one listed. So search without -dev . If a package cannot be found in repo, then unfortunately you have to build/compile that package too. This can become quite a rabbit hole. Or you can just place that missing package binary in correct location, it could be /usr/bin/, /usr/lib/, or wherever depending on package. Though the chance of that works is 50:50.
            If all of this is not understandable to you, I must say please just use whatever tool available via solus repo, snap, or flatpak. Cheers!

              Thank you. I must admit that I'm still very far from understanding what I should do, and more specifically how. It's simply beyond my comprehension of the Linux world. I'll try another solution, maybe Restic or Rescuezilla.

              Best

              Okay. Then let's try. It worked for me.
              Install packages:

              sudo eopkg install -c system.devel
sudo eopkg it meson help2man gettext vala libvte-devel libgee-devel libjson-glib-devel xapp-devel libxkbfile-devel libgnomekbd-devel

              Timeshift compilation:

              git clone https://github.com/linuxmint/timeshift.git
cd timeshift
meson setup build
meson compile -C build
sudo meson install -C build

              Dcron-4.5 compilation:

              wget http://www.jimpryor.net/linux/releases/dcron-4.5.tar.gz
tar xvf dcron-4.5.tar.gz
cd dcron-4.5
make PREFIX=/usr CRONTAB_GROUP=users
sudo make install

              Run. sudo /usr/local/bin/timeshift-gtk
              A desktop file is created in /usr/local/share/applications/. I tried to link but it doesn't work for me.
              sudo ln -s /usr/local/share/applications/timeshift-gtk.desktop /usr/share/applications/

              It is possible that some errors will occur because of missing packages that you don't have, and I have them on the system, so You must read the results carefully when building and compiling.

              If you can spare some time, you can try learn by doing via following along our packaging documentation.
              I have been using solus for over 3 years, only until a month ago I know so little about this side of the distro. At the start, I don't know what i am doing. I still don't know much, but i at least can contribute a little to the distro. It has been fun experience.

              5 months later

              I try your suggestion with success . The only thing I had to do it was to install rsync. Thanks a lot