Kali Linux on bare-metal gets snapshotting functionality

The Offensive Security team has released Kali Unkaputtbar, a new feature that allows Kali Linux installed on bare-metal to make system snapshots automatically, thus enabling users to roll back to a previous system state after a botched upgrade.

Kali Unkaputtbar

In German, “unkaputtbar” means “indestructible,” and this new feature is meant to make life easier for those users who prefer bare-metal Kali installations.

“[Kali Unkaputtbar] provides VM-like snapshots to bare metal, but even better as the system does it all for you,” the team noted.

The new feature is easy to take advantage of: users have to install Kali Linux version 2022.1 or newer with btrfs as the file system, install some additional tools (snapper, snapper-gui, and grub-btrfs) to make the use of the feature easy, and configure them.

The setup allows the system to create automatic snapshots of the root directory, and the user to:

• Manually create snapshots
• List, delete or browse the content of snapshots (and copy lifes across)
• Check out the differences between snapshots (and restore individual files)
• Roll back the system to a previous snapshot
• Boot into a last known good snapshot if the last upgrade made the system otherwise unbootable.

More details on how to use Kali Unkaputtbar are available here.