Veritas Storage Foundation 5.1 SP1 Advanced Features Administrator"s Guide (5900-1503, April 2011)

Administering FileSnaps

This chapter includes the following topics:

■ About FileSnaps

■ Properties of FileSnaps

■ Creating FileSnaps

■ Concurrent I/O to FileSnaps

■ Copy-on-write and FileSnaps

■ Reading from FileSnaps

■ Block map fragmentation and FileSnaps

■ Backup and FileSnaps

■ Using FileSnaps

■ Best practices with FileSnaps

■ Comparison of the logical size output of the fsadm -S shared, du, and df

commands

About FileSnaps

A FileSnap is an atomic space-optimized copy of a file in the same name space,

stored in the same file system. Veritas File System (VxFS) supports snapshots of

files in the VxFS 5.1 SP1 release and later, and on file system disk layout Version

8 and later.

The vxfilesnap command creates a snapshot of a file, and the basic command

syntax is similar to the cp command. If the source file argument is a directory,

the vxfilesnap command creates a snapshot of all of the regular files in the first

Chapter