can someone please point me in the direction of a resource for the use and implementation of snapshots?

[artemisery]

hello everyone,

earlier today my nas randomly decided to wipe one of its vdevs. I dont know why, but that isnt the point of this post. people have been trying to help me find a solution, but unfortunately I fear I must accept the bad news and start rebuilding from a back up. this is going to take me several days, as my back up drives are not organized. normally i put a file on my back up drive, from there i copy it to a sorting folder on my server and over time I sort and rename all the files on the server as needed. this is not the best system, but it allows to have an reliable back up while procrastinating repeatedly, so there is that lol.

anyway I want to find out if snapshots can help prevent me from having to do a multi-day restoration from back up if this happens again in the future. so any resources or general information you have on snapshots would be really appreciated. thank you for the help.

 

[danb35]

The place to start would be the docs:

Periodic Snapshot Tasks

Describes how to create periodic snapshot tasks on TrueNAS CORE.

www.truenas.com

Creating Snapshots

Describes how to create snapshots on TrueNAS CORE.

www.truenas.com

ZFS Primer

Background information about the Zettabyte File System (ZFS).

www.truenas.com

It's important to be aware that:

• Snapshots live on the same pool as your data, so if that pool dies, your snapshots go with it
• Snapshots are a property of a dataset, so if that dataset is destroyed, all its snapshots are also destroyed

However, replication is based on snapshots--so you can take a snapshot, replicate it to a different pool (which may or may not be on a different system), and then if the original pool is damaged, you still have a clean copy of the data elsewhere.

 

[artemisery]

The place to start would be the docs:

Periodic Snapshot Tasks

Describes how to create periodic snapshot tasks on TrueNAS CORE.

www.truenas.com

Creating Snapshots

Describes how to create snapshots on TrueNAS CORE.

www.truenas.com

ZFS Primer

Background information about the Zettabyte File System (ZFS).

www.truenas.com

It's important to be aware that:

• Snapshots live on the same pool as your data, so if that pool dies, your snapshots go with it
• Snapshots are a property of a dataset, so if that dataset is destroyed, all its snapshots are also destroyed

However, replication is based on snapshots--so you can take a snapshot, replicate it to a different pool (which may or may not be on a different system), and then if the original pool is damaged, you still have a clean copy of the data elsewhere.

this was exactly what i needed. thank you very much :D

 

[Whattteva]

Don't forget man zfs-snapshot and man zfs-rollback

 

[Apollo]

OpenZFS contains description of ZFS commands. Not comprehensive enough in term of use case and examples, but an upgrade to the man documentation:

System Administration Commands (8) — OpenZFS documentation

openzfs.github.io