Direct user access to snapshots

[feenberg]

On the Netapp I could tell a user to "just cd .snapshot" to find snapshots of your files. That was something that could be remembered even if not used every day. With Truenas I find that users (including myself) are having difficulty following the instruction

cd /disk/homedirs/.zfs/snapshot/auto-20150729.0000-14d/nber/userid

Is there a way to simplify direct user access to snapshots? The client computers are Linux. I am thinking perhaps the automounter could be used for this purpose, but hoped that someone else had tackled the problem.

Daniel Feenberg
NBER

 

[dlavigne]

Are you cloning the snapshots and mounting them over a share?

 

[feenberg]

Whatever the Truenas does by default - I think the snapshot is mounted as .zfs at the top of the directory tree of the filesystem being snapshotted. I am not sure what a cloned snapshot would be. I was able to write this very simple shell script that transfers the user to the snapshot of their home directory based on a 2-digit day of the month supplied as an argument, but it isn't fully satisfactory, since it has to spawn a new shell, and doesn't work for files in other partitions. Surely there is something better, perhaps by using the automounter?

#!/bin/csh
cd /disk/homedirs/.zfs/snapshot/auto-*$1.0000-14d/$USER