snapshot.debian.org

The snapshot archive is a wayback machine that allows access to old packages based on dates and version numbers. It consists of all past and current packages the Debian archive provides.

The ability to install packages and view source code from any given date can be very helpful to developers and users. It provides a valuable resource for tracking down when regressions were introduced, or for providing a specific environment that a particular application may require to run. The snapshot archive is accessible like any normal apt repository, allowing it to be easily used by all.

The Debian Project would like to thank Glasklar Teknik AB, LeaseWeb Netherlands B.V. and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute for providing hardware and hosting. We would also like to thank the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at the University of British Columbia, Canada and Nordic Gaming for providing hardware/hosting and hardware, respectively, in the past.

Usage

In order to browse snapshots of the archives kept on snapshot.debian.org, simply follow the links on the top left. They will lead you to a list of months for which data was imported, and the list entries in turn will point you to all timestamps of a given month's snapshots.

For example, /archive/debian/ shows that we have imports for the main Debian archive, http://ftp.debian.org/debian/, from 2005 until the present. Picking October of 2009, /archive/debian/?year=2009;month=10, provides us with a list of many different states of the debian archive, roughly spaced 6 hours apart (the update frequency of ftp.debian.org at that time). Following any of these links, say /archive/debian/20091004T111800Z/, shows how ftp.debian.org/debian looked on the 4th of October 2009 at around 11:18 UTC.

If you want to add a specific date's archive to your apt sources.list simply add an entry like these:

deb     https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20091004T111800Z/ lenny main
deb-src https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20091004T111800Z/ lenny main
deb     https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian-security/20091004T121501Z/ lenny/updates main
deb-src https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian-security/20091004T121501Z/ lenny/updates main

To access snapshots using https, you need to install the ca-certificates package; with apt version earlier than 1.5~alpha1 you also need to install the apt-transport-https package. (Note that http:// also still works if you prefer.)

To learn which snapshots exist, i.e. which date strings are valid, simply browse the list as mentioned above. Valid date formats are yyyymmddThhmmssZ or simply yyyymmdd. If there is no import at the exact time you specified you will get the latest available timestamp which is before the time you specified.

To access snapshots of suites using Valid-Until that are older than a dozen days, it is necessary to ignore the Valid-Until header within Release files, in order to prevent apt from disregarding snapshot entries ("Release file expired"). Use aptitude -o Acquire::Check-Valid-Until=false update or apt-get -o Acquire::Check-Valid-Until=false update for this purpose.

If you use at least apt version 1.1.exp9 (stretch and later), you can use this instead:

deb     [check-valid-until=no] https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20091004T111800Z/ lenny main
deb-src [check-valid-until=no] https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20091004T111800Z/ lenny main
deb     [check-valid-until=no] https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian-security/20091004T121501Z/ lenny/updates main
deb-src [check-valid-until=no] https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian-security/20091004T121501Z/ lenny/updates main

If you want anything related to a specific package simply enter the source package name in the form, or find it in the package index.

News

2024-10-08

After some time of trouble with imports lagging behind, Glasklar Teknik AB generously offered to donate and host hardware for a new main site. Earlier this year, a new 4U Supermicro with an AMD Epyc 24C/48T CPU, 512GB RAM, 10GE + 1GE NICs, SSD storage for the system and 480TB HDD for storage of packages was purchased and set up. The HDD's are organised in two RAID6 arrays with 11 x 20TB plus one spare 20TB drive in each array, providing 2 x 164TB worth of storage.

The new server has no problems keeping up with importing the full archives on every update as each run finishes comfortably in time before it's time to run again. For example, the 'debian' archive which is updated every six hours takes on average 11 minutes to import. While the new server is the one doing all the importing of updated archives, the HTTP interface (https://snapshot.debian.org/) is being served by both the new server and one of the VM's at LeaseWeb. Snapshot is currently holding 172TB of data.

Other recent changes include

• A new API endpoint for listing all timestamps grouped by archives (/mr/timestamp/) was added in August 2024.
• The Netfilter rate limiting has been disabled. It will be replaced by rate limiting on the HTTP layer, which should be easier for clients to deal with.

Future outlook:

• There is ongoing work to import all lost debian-ports history.
• A development and test system is being set up for a less stressful develop/test/deploy cycle.
• Replacing SHA-1 with SHA-256 for file identities is planned. Old URLs with SHA-1 strings will keep working.
• A reimplementation of the import scripts is being considered. The rationale is that it should be easier to find programmers who are comfortable with Python than what it is for Ruby.

2022-09-28

In the last couple of weeks, the snapshot.debian.org web frontends were updated from a pylons-based Python 2 application to a flask-based Python 3 application, thanks to work from Baptiste Beauplat.

Snapshot now carries about 135TB of data, and our generous sponsors at Sanger recently upgraded our storage so the archive can keep expanding, as did LeaseWeb a couple of years ago.

2019-09-29

Earlier this month, the binary package node-debbundle-acorn_6.2.1+ds+~0.4.0+~4.0.0+really4.0.0+~1.0.0+~5.0.1+ds+~1.7.0+ds+~0.1.1+~0.3.1+~0.2.0+~0.1.0+~0.3.0+~0.3.0-2_all.deb was uploaded to the archive, breaking imports into snapshot due to the long filename. The issue was fixed a few days later by changing the data type in the database, but imports between September 4 and September 8 unfortunately failed and these snapshots are lost.

Furthermore, the mirror of the debian-debug archive that snapshot.debian.org imports from failed to correctly update starting in June. A symlink had been replaced with a directory causing rsync to fail the mirror run. Since rsync failed, the mirroring script did then not trigger the snapshot importer. The issue was reported on the mailinglist and fixed the same day.

Currently, snapshot consists of close to 90TB of data in about 35 million files and storage capacity is becoming an issue again.

2018-02-13

Snapshot keeps growing. We are now at approximate 60TB of files. This made it necessary to break up the RAID-1 mirror across two external storage arrays which Sanger is kindly providing, and it also meant we needed more machines (now six) at our mirrorsite, which LeaseWeb is generously donating. Thanks!

2017-09-21

Imports of the debian-ports and debian-debug suite had failed for the last three weeks as individual files in those archives have exceeded the size representable in our database schema. We have now updated the database to support file sizes up to 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 Bytes (2⁶³-1; 8 EiB). Just like 640KB in ancient times, this will be truly sufficient indefinitely.

2014-06-01

We added a cluster of machines generously provided by LeaseWeb to provide the snapshot.debian.org service.

Snapshot used to run on two machines hosted at and provided by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and by the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at the University of British Columbia, Canada. A few months ago, the machine at UBC, named stabile.debian.org, started to die. Since it was approaching its storage capacity limits anyway, we began looking for a new second home for snapshot, and LeaseWeb offered! Providing snapshot from two different places (now Sanger and LeaseWeb) allows us to survive temporary and not-so-temporary issues that affect any single site.

Currently, snapshot consists of 24 terabytes of data in about 15 million files, and it appears to be growing at a rate of approximately 5 terabytes a year (or about 10 megabytes per minute).

2012-09-23

Just a quick datapoint: Currently snapshot has about 11 million files in a bit over 16 terabytes of data.

2010-12-14

Around 2010-11-20 the server which hosted snapshot-master stumbled into hardware issues. This did not affect the external storage but only the front-end server. Since the master was down no new data was imported into the snapshot system and the remaining mirror kept presenting its data as of the 20th.

Fortunately the people at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, which hosts snapshot-master, have been able to give us a replacement machine quite quickly. Thanks!

While the master was down, snapshot information was collected by a non-public backup system. This data has been integrated into snapshot.debian.org. Unfortunately, one of the package pools, debian-ports, was not archived on that secondary system, and for this archive we have no data in the affected time period.

2010-09-07

Renamed the backports.org archive to debian-backports as it has now moved to debian.org infrastructure. A rewrite rule has been put in place so old URLs should continue to work (at least for HTTP clients that know how to follow HTTP redirects).

2010-08-16

Set up a caching proxy in front of the two snapshot webservers. This will help in cases where an entire organisation uses various apt sources.list entries on a lot of their machines.

Usually such entities would use proxy caches like squid and then there is no problem, assuming the cache works correctly. Unfortunately apt-cacher, apparently a common choice which is supposed to be smarter for debian archives, completely ignores the Cache-Control headers that snapshot sends and hits this service for all requests made to anything under dist/. A single apt-get update can cause up to a few dozen of such requests and when multiplied by scores of machines - all running the update at the same time - this caused the snapshot backend to run into limits. Now such requests won't hit the backend any more.

2010-04-12

Publicly announce the snapshot.debian.org service. Yay.

For older entries see the older news page.