Update: I managed to get GRUB running, booted into another snapshot, made that one the default and deleted almost all other snapshots. This freed up some space, but my disc is still stuffed and I need to find out how to go on from here. If you have any suggestions, feel free :)

Original Post: A few days ago I noticed, that my system disc (~120gb) is almost maxed out. Since almost everything that takes up considerable disc space resides on my 2 discs, I started investigating, supported by ChatGPT. Turns out I’ve been running on a writable snapshot that keeps growing with each update. Again, important stuff is on my other discs, so reinstalling Linux allover would be a inconvenience, but no problem. Yet, I’d like to try repairing current installation, if only for the lessons learned.

I let ChatGPT summarize everything as a post so you don’t have to deal with my half-educated gibberish:

<ChatGPT> I’m running openSUSE Tumbleweed with the default Btrfs + Snapper setup. My root partition (~119 GB) is suddenly 98% full, even though it should mostly contain system files.

du -xh --max-depth=1 / only shows ~16 GB used, but df -h reports ~113 GB used. Root, /var, /usr, /home, etc. are all on the same Btrfs filesystem. Snapper is enabled.

I confirmed that Btrfs snapshots are consuming the space, but I’m stuck with a writable snapshot (#835) that is currently mounted, so I can’t delete it from the running system.

To make things worse:

GRUB menu does not appear (Shift/Esc does nothing)

The system still boots into Linux, but I can’t select older snapshots

I tried repairing from an Ubuntu live USB, but:

NVMe device names differ from the installed system

Chroot fails with /bin/bash or /usr/bin/env not found

Likely because /usr is a separate Btrfs subvolume and not mounted

At this point I’m trying to:

Properly mount all Btrfs subvolumes from a live system

Chroot into the installed system

Delete old Snapper snapshots

Reinstall GRUB so the menu works again

If anyone has step-by-step guidance for recovering openSUSE Tumbleweed with Btrfs snapshots and broken GRUB access, I’d really appreciate it. I’m comfortable with the command line but want to avoid making things worse. </ChatGPT>

Hope someone can make something of it and help me fix my system.

/edit: Forgot my snapper list output

#0 single — current

#835 * single — mounted 2024-03-18 16:58 CET, 200.82 MiB desc: writable copy of #828

#1802 pre — 2026-01-08 11:50 CET, 864 KiB cleanup: number, desc: System update

#1803 pre — important 2026-01-08 11:51 CET, 848 KiB cleanup: number, desc: zypp (zypper)

#1804 post → #1803 — important 2026-01-08 11:58 CET, 13.54 MiB

#1805 post → #1802 2026-01-09 12:08 CET, 3.23 MiB desc: System update

#1806 pre — important 2026-01-09 12:08 CET, 2.50 MiB cleanup: number, desc: zypp (zypper)

#1807 post → #1806 — important 2026-01-09 12:08 CET, 960 KiB