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Media ComposerSnapshots
Keep an exact copy of the files as they appeared in a space at a given time.
Snapshots are like a picture frozen in time of a space. As the folders and files in your space change, the snapshot protects data that has been deleted or changed. With the Snapshots tab of the Spaces page, you can see what a space used to look like and restore files if needed.
You can create snapshots manually or schedule them to happen automatically. You can browse and compare snapshots, see what's different, go back to a previous snapshot, delete unnecessary snapshots, and see how much space each snapshot is taking up.
For more information on the Snapshots interface, go here.
How Snapshots Work
Let’s dive a little deeper into how snapshots actually work.
Copy on Write
The ZFS filesystem on your creative.space server uses a copy-on-write architecture. What this means is that instead of writing data directly to disk, i.e. your hard drives, it is written to the RAM in the server first. Each block of data is checksummed and verified between the RAM and what’s written to disk first and only then does the filesystem point to the new data.
Existing data is NEVER overwritten. When existing files are modified, the filesystem just points to the new data behind the scenes. What a snapshot does is save the pointers for a space at a specific moment in time.
Data only gets deleted from disk when nothing is pointing to it. When you delete or modify a file in your active space, the snapshot still points to it, giving you a safety net to go back and restore from. Our Snapshots interface provides a quick and intuitive way to find and restore deleted and modified data.
Copy-on-write provides powerful protection from ransomware attacks. When these attacks target your mounted spaces and encrypt their contents, the snapshots allow you to restore your data. Since snapshots are read-only, they can’t be altered.
Referenced vs. Used
Snapshots are created instantly and take up no space until data is modified or deleted.
There are two capacity metrics available for each snapshots: referenced and used.
- Reference - The total size of the snapshot’s contents, not how much capacity the snapshot is using. I.e. how much capacity is needed to store a copied instance of the snapshot.
- Used - The total capacity that the specific snapshot is using. This number can be deceptive, since it only accounts for how much capacity will be cleared from the system when the snapshot is deleted. If other snapshots reference the same files, then only the last snapshot to reference the data will show it under used.
Scheduling and Expiration
Taking snapshots protects your data from accidental loss, but they can become an obstacle to clearing up capacity on your system. If you routinely migrate lots of data between storage tiers, then you will be forced to find and delete all of the snapshots referencing that data in order to free up that space for reuse.
To make it easy to protect your data while also minimizing manual effort require to manage snapshots, we’ve built two unique features for snapshots: scheduled tasks and expiration.
- Scheduled Tasks - Instead of manually creating snapshots, you can schedule them on a regular interval.
- Expire In - Instead of manually deleting snapshots, you can set them to expire in a set number of days.
What we recommend is setting up what we call “Rolling Snapshots” when creating a schedule task for snapshots. What does this look like?:
- Set ‘Expire in’ to ‘Custom Days’ and leave the value as “1”.
- Next to the calendar icon, change the interval from ‘Once’ to ‘Hourly’.
This results in a snapshot being taken every hour that expires in a day, giving you a 24 hour window to recover deleted or modified files.
You have the option to take snapshots every day and expire in 7 days, every week and expire in 30 days, and so on, but this will extend the time it takes before capacity is cleared for reuse on your system.
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