Time Slider provides a graphical way for Oracle Solaris desktop users to restore individual files or directories from automatically scheduled, incremental snapshots of home directories. Once activated and set up, Time Slider takes a snapshot of every ZFS file system every 15 minutes, by default. These snapshots are then deleted again over time, such that only one snapshot is kept for each of the previous 24 hours, one for each of the previous 7 days, and one for each previous week that the Time Slider service was running.
A snapshot is a read-only copy of a file system or volume. Snapshots can be created almost instantly, and they initially consume no additional disk space within the pool. However, as data within the active dataset changes, the snapshot consumes disk space by continuing to reference the old data, thus preventing the disk space from being freed.
Time Slider snapshot services can automate periodic snapshots for any ZFS file system, including boot environments, even on non-desktop systems. However, the desktop/time-slider package does require that the desktop-incorporation package be installed, even if the Oracle Solaris Desktop will not be used on that machine.
For more information about Time Slider, see Chapter 6, Working With Oracle Solaris ZFS Snapshots and Clones, in Managing ZFS File Systems in Oracle Solaris 11.2 .