HOWTO: Using ZFS Snapshots

Posted on the July 13th, 2007 under HOWTOs,Sys Admin,Technology / Computing by jglemza

So the time has come that you’d like to protect the current status of your drive and be able to revert back to this state in the future if something bad happens. Enter snapshots.

root@ufuk:~# zfs snapshot shet@13july2007

And now you have it. You have a snapshot of your data. You can see the size of the snapshot by running:

root@ufuk:~# zfs list
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
shet 266G 649G 266G /shet
shet@13july2007 103K - 266G -
syspool 2.77G 32.9G 24K none
syspool/rootfs 2.77G 32.9G 2.60G legacy
syspool/rootfs@default 178M - 648M -

The size of the snapshot will grow as things change. To recover files from a snapshot, mount it and copy it out of the snapshot.

root@ufuk:~# zfs mount shet@13july2007 /mnt/snapshet

To delete a snapshot, run:

root@ufuk:~# zfs destroy shet@13july2007