topic Re: Comparing Snapshots to Original Files in ONTAP Discussions

Comparing Snapshots to Original Files

__WillGreen_13030 — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 07:31:53 GMT

As I understand it, if I have a volume shared by NFS then snapshots are visible in a directory called .snapshots. In this directory there is a directory for each snapshot which contains a view of how the whole filesystem looked at that time.

Imagine I'm updating an in-house application. I take a snapshot, perform the update, but then find a problem. I could rollback to the snapshot, but it might be more useful to be able to see which files were changed by the update. Is there an easy way to do this within the snapshot directory or with ONTAP?

Forgive this basic question, I don't yet have access to a NetApp (I will be getting an evaluation unit in a few weeks).

Re: Comparing Snapshots to Original Files

adamfox — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 19:06:26 GMT

I can't think of a good way to do that off the top of my head within the controller. You'd probably have to run a find from a client and find mtimes > the snapshot time.

Re: Comparing Snapshots to Original Files

__WillGreen_13030 — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 20:53:22 GMT

I imagine that's very IO intensive though, or is it much less painful on a NetApp than a more UFS filesystem?