I’ve been using Linux for the better part of 4 years so I’m not new to it, but I’ve always learned stuff on an as-needed basis. Today I ran into an issue that I want to prevent in the future since I had a mini heart attack thinking about how my last backup on this system was… Never since I’m an idiot who forgot to set it up like I have on my laptop. Here are my steps:

  • Ran sudo pacman -Syu; sudo pacman -Syy like I do every few days
  • packages updated
  • restarted computer
  • can only boot into emergency mode

The journal was really long so I moved past it and went to the pacman logs, linux had updated from 6.4.3.1-1 to 6.4.3.1-2. Nothing else was important enough to cause the system to only boot into emergency (gcc, vbox, some libs) so I did a quick pacman -U to the cached 6.4.3.1-1 version for both Linux and Linux headers and rebooted - hurrah it was fixed! But I have no idea why it happened, or how to prevent it.

Has anyone else ran into this issue when updating? Any advice for preventing future crashes or issues like this so I don’t fear updating?

Edit: Thanks to everyone for your advice! I ended up following multiple bits of advice. I reinstalled arch to get btrfs as the filesystem (didn’t have anything important other than some docked-compose files and books yet) and grabbed the linux-lts kernal as a backup as well. I haven’t configured snapper yet, but it’s on my list of things to do.

  • @[email protected]
    18•1 year ago

    Ran sudo pacman -Syu; sudo pacman -Syy like I do every few days

    Syy forces the package database to be updated even if no updates are available.

    In my opinion, this makes no sense, especially after you have already run pacman -Syu before. Basically, you only generate additional, unnecessary traffic on the mirror you are using. Pacman -Syu is normally always sufficient.

    The journal was really long so I moved past it

    The display of the systemd journal can be easily filtered. For example, with journalctl -p err -b -1, all entries of the last boot process that are marked as error, critical, alarm or emergency are displayed.

    Has anyone else ran into this issue when updating?

    Not me. But other users do. Some of them also use a distribution other than Arch (or a distribution based on it). When I look at the problems, the current kernel is probably quite a minefield as far as problems are concerned.

    Any advice for preventing future crashes or issues like this so I don’t fear updating?

    As other users have already recommended, you could additionally install the LTS kernel. And if you use BTRFS as a file system, create snapshots before an update (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/snapper#Wrapping_pacman_transactions_in_snapshots).

    And it should be obvious that important data should be backed up on a regular basis.

      • @Zenzio
        4•1 year ago

        I guess that’s a bit better than the original command in question. But from what I understand it’s still unnecessary and there is simply no need to force the refresh. A regular pacman -Syu is all you need and will refresh all databases that need it.