Beginner question on ZFS - Searching snapshots

[JohnZFSUser]

If I use FreeNAS and ZFS to take a snapshot every evening of my FreeNAS files, and I want to restore to the previous version (or all previous versions) of a file (but I'm not sure when that was), is there a way to search through ZFS snapshots for the filename so I know which snapshot to 'clone' and get the most recent old version of the file out of?

Thanks!

 

[dlavigne]

You can get a listing of the files within the snapshot in the .zfs directory of the volume/dataset that was snapshotted. See http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/819-5461/gbiqe/ for an example.

 

[jgreco]

And the .zfs directory may be invisible but it is there regardless.

 

[JohnZFSUser]

Thank you!

I'll put some notes below in case they help other newbies. Being brand new to Freenas and ZFS here is what I figured out...

I typed: zfs list -t snapshot

and got:

NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT test@manual-20140413 152K - 440K - test@manual-20140413b 156K - 444K -
And I figured out to get to the snapshot files location I had to type:

cd /mnt/test

And then to get in the invisible .zfs directory I typed:

cd .zfs

Then typed:

cd snapshot

And I could see my snapshot directories:
drwxr-xr-x 5 root wheel 5 Apr 13 12:46 manual-20140413 drwxr-xr-x 5 root wheel 5 Apr 13 12:46 manual-20140413b

And view the files in each of them.

So I guess to answer my own question, to find files in a snapshot, you might type something like:

cd /mnt/test/.zfs/snapshot

then type:

find . -name example-file-name.txt

 

[fracai]

You can also use "zfs diff" to see what has changed between two snapshots or a snapshot and the current state.