Detailed backuping and restoring of ZFS Snapshots

[loganderson]

ZFS Snapshots feature are awesome, that's for sure.

But I'm sure that having a snapshot of the entire drive or entire datasets is sort of a waste in many cases.

There should be possible for me to choose which directories I can backup or restore. Imagine that I have to restore my /mnt/HD1/media directory, but need to make the /mnt/HD1/documents intact. This can't be done today, because FreeNAS doesn't ask me which directory is coming back.

Or in other case, I ONLY want one specific folder/subfolders to be snapshotted, because the rest in not that important.

It think this would be a HUGE improvement of Snapshots.

[william]

Thank for your concern but this is a feature (or limitation if you want to call that) of ZFS.

If you just want to snapshot important data, store them in separate datasets.

[loganderson]

Ok Thank you.

Actually half my problem is just gone because I've found that "Cloning" a Snapshot mounts it so I can recover chosen files/directories.

Now 2 questions:

• Why is it called "Cloning" and not "Mounting"?
• If I can do advanced restoring manually by cloning-copyingsomefiles-destroyingclone, why can't that be done transparently by FreeNAS via GUI?

[william]

1 - Simply because it clones the snapshot, it does not mount it.
2 - Because it would not make any sense at all.

Please, for questions and discussing about that "features" use ​http://forums.freenas.org before opening tickets.

Thank you very much.