ZFS Snapshots Explained: How To Protect Your Data From Mistakes, Malware, & Ransomware

One of the best channels to learn about ZFS, TrueNAS Scale and network… watched many videos, while trying to replicate the ideas on my server (play, stop, play,…) Thank you for the great content❤

I'm 79 for ZFS I prefer the raw experience. If I want restore an old version of a file, I use the file manager to go to the .zfs directory, go to the folder of the snapshot and than I copy and paste the file I want to restore to the required directory :) TrueNAS seems to complicate a very basic operation. If I create a dataset, I use the CLI and I make sure that the .zfs folder is visible and I set the mount-point of my main datasets to /media/dataset-name, which on Linux and Windows makes the dataset visible in the file manager like a mounted disk :)

Another excellent content in ZFS, thank you Tom!

A word of caution regarding snapshots and malware. In general, I would NOT depend solely on snapshots for protection against malicious changes (e.g., ransomware). Because the snapshot is read-only and only changes are recorded from the point of the snapshot, the snapshot necessarily must remain online and accessible, unlike a traditional backup/imaging to remote storage (e.g., USB enclosure turned on only for those purposes). That means there's always the potential that your snapshot could be corrupted as well! Yeah, I know, in theory that's NOT supposed to happen, but malware gets more malicious and capable by the day. And as long as any data is online, it's a target. Snapshots are best suited for protection against accidental changes. When it comes to malicious changes, the best approach remains an offline backup/image. That's not to say I wouldn't use snapshots; they're still very useful. I use them w/ VirtualBox as well, but NOT because of concerns about malware. But you need to understand how they work to appreciate their limits.

I love rollback. I do not allow empty - I do hourly snapshots but for 2 days on my NAS, then I do Dialy I keep for 2 weeks. It's served me well!

Very nice video, I didn't setup snapshots yet unfortunately but I will. Thanks for this video, it reminded me of doing this. Snapshots here work the same way when I do snapshots in VirtualBox for the VMs.

Thank you Tom for this great explanations on ZFS.

Great vid Lorry... ZFS is black magic. love it!

This is awesome, Thanks, Tom!

Super informative, thanks Tom

Good tutorial videos, I've been looking for tutorials and haven't found much deep dive information with demo and break down on how it works. Im looking into changing from Unraid to TrueNAS Scale. What size of NVME drive you recommend for the OS to live on. I currently have a 2tb NVME I was using as Plex metadata only. Writing everything directly to the pool.

Great video!!! I recognise that there is a significantly more technical video that explains what happens if you delete a snapshot in the middle. My question is since space is finite, the thing that I have never understood about ZFS snapshotting is what happens if you tell it to keep 2 weeks worth of snapshots, and then it starts purging old(er) snapshots. Does it delete that data or does that differential become "promoted" to be a part of the "actual"/"original" dataset? If you don't mind explaining this a little further, that would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Great content as always! I learned that Windows can restore snapshots! Is it the case that Windows has ZFS support? Or is this baked into the SMB protocol?

Tom, is there a GUI method to view these files and act on them, similar to a “file explorer”, rather than doing it all via the command line? Thanks

A quick question with snapshots the first snapshot how big will it be if you got a 20tb of storage and you have 5tb of data will the first snapshot be 5tb?

are shadow copies available for iSCSI?

Does this now support block(iscsi), unless am wrong in core only nfs/smb were supported.

The personal company ad grows bigger and bigger. At some point in the future it will probably be bigger than the whole clip.

I am the super nerd😂

Just found your channel and I'm lovin' it! You have a new sub! :face-blue-smiling: