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I don’t use Linux too much, but this matches my experience… I have a raspberry pi 3, running a home automation server.
One day I go to upgrade a plugin for it. It tells me I need to upgrade the home automation server first, so I go do that. It fails because my Node.js install needs to be upgraded too, so I do that. Then, I try to upgrade the home automation server again, but that now fails with a strange error. Stack trace says something about a missing C++ lib in my Node.js install, so I look it up. I try to install the missing library, but it gives more errors. I do more searching and find loads of other people with this issue, my raspbian version can’t support this C++ library version without first being upgraded. Damn, well, it’s midnight and I have work in the morning, I don’t have time for that. I try to get my home automation server up so I can go to bed, but it fails due to problems with the Node.js install. Can’t go to bed without this server running or my smart home accessories don’t work. I try to downgrade to the previous Node.js version. This fails with another error. Couldn’t upgrade, now I can’t downgrade, I’m stuck. I read a thread on GitHub… other people are reinstalling the OS from scratch and starting over. Damn… I start trying to backup my config files so I can do this too. One more check of another post on GitHub and I find some guy shares a command to downgrade Node.js without a fresh OS install. Perfect! I run this, restart my home automation server, and go to bed. Maybe I’ll try to figure out this problem another day.
See, this is why BTRFS is a good idea.
I borked one of my installs today by accident. I'm not even sure what happened... I upgraded the kernel, then weird things started happening, then X just froze, I restarted, runit would't even go to phase 3 of the boot process, X couldn't load, just gave a bunch of errors. Oh well, BTRFS to the rescue 😊. This is where things get interesting 😂.
I was on the phone with my wife while I was trying to bring back a snapshot of the volume... have no idea what I did, but I managed to wipe the root subvolume 😂. Not like just empty, but completely gone 🤣. OK 😬. Let's see if the snapshots are still there. Yep, still there. OK, recreated the subvolume and tried to load a snapshot of it, this time, wuthout talking on my phone 😂. Worked like a charm 😊. Restart, sure enough, it loads grub and the OS, everything's back to normal 😊.
Start using filesystems that can make snapshots, like BTRFS or ZFS. Sure, they have a bit of a learning curve, but trust me, it's worth it.