Today, out of nowhere, my shell started to misbehave. My prompt suddenly reverted to default. Some unexpected "command not found" errors started popping up. Something was off.
I went to check my shell configuration. The directory was not there. I then went look into ~/.config. Half of the directories inside were simply gone.
I immediately flipped into what the fuck is happening mode.
This system is an Alpine root-on-ZFS. I have a script called by cron every 20 minutes that snapshots everything.
First I went into the snapshot directory and started copying some things. I soon noticed it was just too much missing. How to map out what was gone in the first place? Even so, copying would only go so far because I was duplicating things.
I looked to my left at the resource monitor. I had less than 1 GB left of free space. That was not going to work.
I flip some pages, looking for an incantation...
% zfs rollback zroot/home@20m
A long second hanged in the air. Then all the resource monitor's bars flipped at once to green: 53% free space.
"Blessed be the ZFS Daemons and the Authors who conjured Them."
The system was still confused, so I rebooted. It let its conscience drift - as it is used to -, uncertainty still heavy in the air. Then it resurfaced... every line of output unconcerned.
Back up, no trace was left of the seconds leading up to the warp. The only suspicion came from a cryptography guardian, who noticed something was wrong about the timestamps. "Please re-enter the passcodes", it asked. Every other blob was either unconcerned or unimpressed with the glitch.
Like any time travel, the only trace left was in my memory. No history anywhere has me looking for that spell. I booted 20 minutes into the past and that's from when I am writing to you.
#ZFS
