Comments on: ZFS: backup, snapshot, rollback, restore, boot and more http://fuzzy.wordpress.com/2007/05/28/zfs-file-rollback/ "Happiness is not a state to arrive at, but a manner of travelling" —Margaret Lee Runbeck Sun, 12 Oct 2008 05:28:39 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=MU hourly 1 By: Graham Perrin http://fuzzy.wordpress.com/2007/05/28/zfs-file-rollback/#comment-198 Graham Perrin Mon, 28 May 2007 16:49:22 +0000 http://fuzzy.wordpress.com/2007/05/28/zfs-file-rollback/#comment-198 Graham Perrin: — thanks Mark J Musante for the focus; what he mentions is familiar — recalls that Solaris 10 bootable install media was/is not bootable in Parallels Desktop for Mac — wonders where he bookmarked the workaround for that incompatibility — prepares to boot Ubuntu 7.04 in a VM to maybe dabble with ZFS in FUSE on Linux. <blockquote>cp them to recover them</blockquote> … so, the snapshot directory is browsable/searchable at the command line <em>without</em> actually rolling back the system? Graham Perrin:

— thanks Mark J Musante for the focus; what he mentions is familiar

— recalls that Solaris 10 bootable install media was/is not bootable in Parallels Desktop for Mac

— wonders where he bookmarked the workaround for that incompatibility

— prepares to boot Ubuntu 7.04 in a VM to maybe dabble with ZFS in FUSE on Linux.

cp them to recover them

… so, the snapshot directory is browsable/searchable at the command line without actually rolling back the system?

]]> By: Mark J Musante http://fuzzy.wordpress.com/2007/05/28/zfs-file-rollback/#comment-197 Mark J Musante Mon, 28 May 2007 14:20:56 +0000 http://fuzzy.wordpress.com/2007/05/28/zfs-file-rollback/#comment-197 ZFS supports filesystem rollback. What Richard Relling meant in his response on the opensolaris thread was that you can use a ZFS filesystem as the filesystem for a CVS or SVN repository, and can use the source code control features to rollback files. As ZFS snapshots cover the entire filesystem, you can rollback to a given point in time, but not a given file. If you snapshot, for example, once every hour, you can roll the filesystem back to what it looked like N hours ago. New files created since then will be gone, but the file you were looking for will be there. Note that you can use the .zfs/snapshot directory to look for individual files and cp them to recover them. But again, this is only possible if you've got a snapshot to refer to. ZFS supports filesystem rollback. What Richard Relling meant in his response on the opensolaris thread was that you can use a ZFS filesystem as the filesystem for a CVS or SVN repository, and can use the source code control features to rollback files.

As ZFS snapshots cover the entire filesystem, you can rollback to a given point in time, but not a given file. If you snapshot, for example, once every hour, you can roll the filesystem back to what it looked like N hours ago. New files created since then will be gone, but the file you were looking for will be there. Note that you can use the .zfs/snapshot directory to look for individual files and cp them to recover them. But again, this is only possible if you’ve got a snapshot to refer to.

]]>