Solaris ZFS snapshot to save machine state…

Very nice feature of solaris is to use a zfs snapshots to protect the current state/configuration of a machine.

And it is very easy to use, all we have to do is:

> beadm list
BE Active Mountpoint Space Policy Created
-- ------ ---------- ----- ------ -------
solaris NR / 11.23G static 2013-07-04 16:45
solaris-backup-1 - - 155.0K static 2013-07-04 17:28

After the installation of solaris a snapshot was already created automatically.

After installation and configuration of various software we can create a new snapshot:

beadm create -e solaris solaris-backup-2

If something bad will happen afterwards we can just simple select the backup at the boot manager! and then activate our backup as the active snapshot:

beadm activate solaris-backup-2

I think the old/bad snapshot/base can be deleted afterwards, but i didn’t yet tried that, maybe it is a good idea to create a base snapshot and working snapshot, and set the working snapshot as the active one, so in the case of an error we can create a new snapshot based on the base snapshot, and afterwards we can remove the bad working snapshot.

Solaris is very smart 🙂