Displaying and Accessing ZFS Snapshots

By default, snapshots no longer appear in the zfs list output. You must use the zfs list -t snapshot command to display snapshot information. You can also enable the listsnapshots pool property instead. For example:

$ zpool get listsnapshots system1
NAME     PROPERTY       VALUE      SOURCE
system1  listsnapshots  off        default
$ zpool set listsnapshots=on system1
$ zpool get listsnapshots system1
NAME     PROPERTY       VALUE      SOURCE
system1  listsnapshots  on         local

Snapshots of file systems are placed in the .zfs/snapshot directory within the root of the file system. For example, if system1/home/kaydo is mounted on /home/kaydo, then the system1/home/kaydo@thursday snapshot data is accessible in the /home/kaydo/.zfs/snapshot/thursday directory.

$ ls /system1/home/kaydo/.zfs/snapshot
thursday   tuesday    wednesday

The following examples shows how to list snapshots.

$ zfs list -t snapshot -r system1/home
NAME                          USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
system1/home/kaydo@tuesday     45K      -  2.11G  -
system1/home/kaydo@wednesday   45K      -  2.11G  -
system1/home/kaydo@thursday      0      -  2.17G  -

The following example shows how to list snapshots that were created for a particular file system.

$ zfs list -r -t snapshot -o name,creation system1/home
NAME                          CREATION
system1/home/kaydo@tuesday    Fri Aug  3 15:18 2012
system1/home/kaydo@wednesday  Fri Aug  3 15:19 2012
system1/home/kaydo@thursday   Fri Aug  3 15:19 2012
system1/home/glori@today      Fri Aug  3 15:24 2012
system1/home/hsolo@today      Fri Aug  3 15:24 2012