How to create immutable snapshots on Unity

Hello everyone.

Welcome to another how to video with me. Richard Hornsby, and today we're talking about how to create immutable snapshots on on unity or unity storage systems.

Okay, so, so let's get straight to it. If I just minimize that, you should see a nice Unity here in the background. So obviously, I've kind of skipped a few steps here, we've got a storage system configured, and then we've got the pool, pool one we're using in this example. And then within pool one, we've got our file system as well.

So if I click on the file system, you'll see it. I've just kind of presented that to my laptop, and you can see it here, actually, if I just click on that, there it is. So there's not, not much in it at the moment, but, but we'll add some data in there just for the purposes of taking a snapshot.

But anyway, talking talking of snapshots, if we head to data protection and click on snapshots, you'll see some that I've made earlier. So if we just select the pool that we're dealing with in the data set, we can see all of these snapshots that have been done previously. Okay, so this top one is one that I've actually scheduled to take automatically. I'm doing that via a cron job, okay? And then here's some kind of older ones that I've taken just manual snapshots. And you can see that they've actually expired, so we can delete those ones. And here's the latest one that I've taken just before I did this video.

Okay, and there's options available to us for these snapshots. So here we can mount a snapshot. So we can mount that if you wish to view it and use it for any reason, you just mount it as a new chair. You can extend the retention data as well. You can never reduce it, and that would defeat the purpose. But you can extend it if you need to, and then obviously you can roll back as well. So if there's been an event of some type and you want to go back to before that event, then obviously you can roll back that snapshot and get yourself back to where you were.

But let's go ahead and let's go ahead and try and take a snapshot. So if I had to file systems, okay, let's make some changes. First of all, okay, let's load that file system up, and I've also got some data sheets here. So let's copy some copy some information over to that share.

There we go. Hopefully that won't take too long to do, and we should see some of the data change in the background here. So if I head back to snapshots, it probably won't be that obvious, but here you'll see this change in size again, that's because of the way that we're actually doing the snapshots we're using redirect on right? It's a bit kind of, I don't want to get too down into the weeds, but we'll probably do a separate video on that, but hopefully that copy has been done. So let's, let's go ahead and take a snapshot of that file system.

So again, on this action. So here we're just under Storage, and then file systems under Actions. We've got active archive, we've got take a snapshot, and we've got delete the file system. Okay, so let's go ahead and take a snapshot.

What it will do is it will say, Okay, give it a name. Let's just make that stand out. If we cannot just call that example, and we've got the option to enable immutability for this snapshot. Now you can set the retention. Be careful with that. Okay, if you set that to 99 days, it will be stuck with you for 99 days. There's not a lot we can do about that, so just be careful. I'm going to set that to one day, just for this example, and then you can type, take an immutable snapshot. Just to save me a bit of bother, I'm just going to copy that and paste it.

There you go. Once it's happy with that, you can go ahead and take the snapshots now. It won't take too long, and there's not a massive amount of data on there. But if we then head to snapshots, we should be able to see that new snapshot that we've taken available to us.

So let's click on File System, I think, example, yes, there it is, and there you go. Okay, so don't be confused by the zero bytes. That's correct. Again, we'll try and explain that in a different video. And how we direct online is working for us. But there it is. That's That's how simple it is to take a file system and just simply create an immutable snapshot for it.

Okay, so a few more important things to add is, obviously, whilst they're still within the retention, the option to delete them isn't there, so this trash can icon disappears. Okay, so I can't delete them even if I select Delete snapshots at the top here, it's going to tell me, Okay, we'll go ahead and delete some snapshots, but we will not delete the unexpired, immutable snapshots. Okay? So they are very well protected. They're very, very locked down, and that applies all the way across the infrastructure.

So if I click on storage systems here, you can see I've got two storage systems, but the icon the trash can for this one is gone. And that's because it's aware it has immutable snapshots on it. If we just go then to the storage pool, this time, the trash can is available. If I attempt to delete that pool, and I will do if we complete this, I'll click on delete. Now will look like it's in progress, but it won't be deleted. Okay, we'll be hit with an error message any second now.

There it is.

So this is the important bit. Okay, the operation could not be completed because it contains immutable snapshots, so it's completely locked down. Even if we head down to the file system and attempt to do the same thing, click on Delete, type in the word delete, and we'll get pretty much the same error message saying we can't go ahead and do that because there's immutable snapshots on there. So the point is that with those immutable snapshots, it's not just the snapshots that are immutable, okay, it's the whole file structure is protected using Unity.

So hopefully you found that useful and join us on the next one.

Thank you very much.