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Accessing ZFS snapshots

I make hourly snapshots of the ZFS filesystems on my home server. This is quite easy using a small script called "zfs-snapshot.sh" (which I found on the web) and the following lines in root's crontab file:

# perform zfs snapshots
3  *  *  *  *   /root/zfs-snapshot.sh pool0 hourly 25
13 0  *  *  *   /root/zfs-snapshot.sh pool0 daily  32
23 0  *  *  0   /root/zfs-snapshot.sh pool0 weekly 60

7  *  *  *  *   /root/zfs-snapshot.sh datapool hourly 25
17 0  *  *  *   /root/zfs-snapshot.sh datapool daily  32
27 0  *  *  0   /root/zfs-snapshot.sh datapool weekly 60

This keeps a day's worth of hourly snapshots, a month's worth a daily backups, and a year's worth of weekly backups (I should perhaps also keep a decade's worth of annual backups?!).

This is useful and can be really easily accessed... For example, I restored "/usr/local/lib/libintl.so.9" from a recent snapshot by doing:

cp /.zfs/snapshot/daily.5/usr/local/lib/libintl.* /usr/local/lib

Accessing snapshots through .../.zfs/snapshot is quite handy.

PS. For the record, the zfs-snapshot.sh script is here.

/FreeBSD | Posted at 15:42 | permanent link