VERITAS Storage Foundation 4.1 Intelligent Storage Provisioning Administrator's Guide

Chapter 5, Administering Instant Snapshots

Creating Instant Snapshots

You have the following choices for what to do with an instant snapshot:

◆ Refresh the contents of the snapshot. This creates a new point-in-time image of the original

volume ready for another backup. If synchronization was already in progress on the snapshot,

this operation may result in large portions of the snapshot having to be resynchronized. See

“Refreshing an Instant Snapshot (vxsnap refresh)” on page 88 for details.

◆ Restore the contents of the original volume from the snapshot volume. For full instant snapshot

volumes, you can choose whether none, a subset, or all of the plexes of the snapshot volume

are returned to the original volume as a result of the operation. A space-optimized instant

snapshot always remains intact at the end of the operation. See “Restoring a Volume from an

Instant Snapshot (vxsnap restore)” on page 89 for details.

◆ Dissociate the snapshot volume entirely from the original volume. This may be useful if you

want to use the copy for other purposes such as testing or report generation. If desired, you can

delete the dissociated volume. See “Dissociating an Instant Snapshot (vxsnap dis)” on page 90

for details.

Note For space-optimized instant snapshots, this operation is only useful if you then want to

delete the snapshot altogether.

◆ If the snapshot is part of a snapshot hierarchy, you can also choose to split this hierarchy from

its parent volumes. See “Splitting an Instant Snapshot Hierarchy (vxsnap split)” on page 91 for

details.

Note This operation is not supported for space-optimized instant snapshots.