Holding ZFS Snapshots

Oracle Solaris 10 9/10 Release: If you implement different automatic snapshot policies so that older snapshots are being inadvertently destroyed by zfs receive because they no longer exist on the sending side, you might consider using the snapshots hold feature in this Solaris release.

Holding a snapshot prevents it from being destroyed. In addition, this feature allows a snapshot with clones to be deleted pending the removal of the last clone by using the zfs destroy -d command.

You can hold a snapshot or set of snapshots. For example, the following syntax puts a hold tag, keep, on tank/home/cindys/snap@1.

# zfs hold keep tank/home/cindys@snap1

For more information, see Holding ZFS Snapshots.