[Annoyance Feedback] Drive Selected To Backup Onto gets Re-mounted to a Different Location

[ThisNekoGuy]

Describe the bug

After extended periods of time, Timeshift re-mounts explicitly mounted drives (via fstab, at least) to /run/timeshift/backup; this indirectly causes other applications to sometimes fail to perform tasks because they expect to perform them at the original mount point but find nothing is mounted there anymore.

What's odd about this though, terminal shells get hijacked into cd-ing into the new mount location (if a terminal was already open on that drive) when using relative cd path movements and/or sometimes just silently transitions to the new mount location but this behavior only sometimes occurs in file managers such as Dolphin.

This has bothered me as a user for a long time.

To Reproduce

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Mount an external drive/partition via fstab
2. Open Timeshift
3. Set Timeshift to mount the OS drive to somewhere on the mounted drive
4. Open a terminal on the mounted drive and make a few nested folders
5. Wait maybe a few days (or however long expected to be necessary) for Timeshift to perform its expected automated backup tasks
6. Navigate between the created folders in that terminal
7. Find that the mounted drive location has been changed to /run/timeshift/backup

Expected behavior

Mounted non-OS storage drives should not have their mount locations changed to perform backup tasks.

System:

• Linux Distribution Name and Version: Arch Linux (Rolling-release)
• Desktop: KDE Plasma 5 (version 5.23.5)
• Application Version: v21.09.1

[Odzinic]

I'm experiencing this same issue with a similar system config. Would it be possible for Timeshift to umount the backup drive after performing the backup if mounting is required?

[cebas]

+1