Roll Back An Immutable Snapshot on Nexsan Unity

Hello everyone, and welcome to another how to video. Today, we're going to be looking at how to roll back an immutable snapshot on Nexsan Unity so handy if you know you've had a particular issue with some data that could be corruption. It could be, you know, the dreaded ransomware, something like that, and you need to roll back to get to some workable data that you're confident with.

So this video is just going to take you through that, so hopefully you find it useful.

Okay, so we're going to leap straight into it. So I'm not going to talk through how to create a file system or anything like that there in previous How To videos. So just, just find those if you need to do that. But what I'm trying to do here is just show you that I've got a file share. Okay? It's called test, and here it is, just shared out to my Windows Server. And I've got, I've got a couple of files in there, okay, so the idea being, I'm going to try and simulate, if you know, if an extra file is added or something's taken away, and how we can roll back. So just to prove that I'm not making this up, so a couple of files. So in critical data, I've got some very important stuff. And then in data one, I've got some interesting things as well. So there's just a couple of files in that data system. So that this point, let's go ahead and take a manual, immutable snapshot.

Okay, so again, just down here in the file system, you'll see the little camera just take a snapshot.

Now let's call that let's call that something. Let's call it first. Can't type first snapshot. Okay. Now let's make it immutable as well, because obviously this, is about immutability. Now I'm not going to, because it's a kind of a demo Lab. I'm only going to keep that as one day, but you may have something a little bit more sensible, okay, so to save me typing that out, I'm just gonna copy it, paste that in.

Now, don't forget that. Although you can take manual snapshots, you can schedule them, and there's a how to video on how to do that as well. Okay, so that should be the snapshot done. So if I head along at the top here, so I'm in storage file systems at the moment, if I go to Data Protection and then snapshots, we should see that snapshot in there.

So just select the storage pool, pull one test that's the file system that I created, and there it is. So we've got a snapshot. It's immutable. It's going to be, you know, retained until that date. The retention date doesn't mean it will be deleted, by the way. It just means that the immutability will kind of go so you can then delete it, because at the moment, there's no action available to delete that particular snapshot. Now you'll notice it's 00, bits in size. Now that's hard to explain. That's because we use redirect on write technology, so that will sit there as zero at the moment. So let me try and kind of create an example of how that would change. And let's go to the file system that I created. Okay?

So now if we create something new in here, so let's create another text document, okay, and we'll call that data two, okay. And then in data two, we're going to call that. What should we do that? So let's just put some some stuff in there. Okay, so you know that it's changed. We'll save that back. Okay, just come off here, go back. Data protection, snapshots. Oh, it did change it. So then you've got a change, right? You've got a change in size, and that's because of the change that I made. Okay? Now, I might do another video on this, because it is quite, it's quite deep, but just to show you that it's, you know, it's getting that snapshot available so he knows what the changes are, okay? So, so just as a quick working example there, if I go here, we've got data to you saw me create data two okay, if you want me to roll that back, we can do that. Okay? We can just go to roll back snapshot. Okay, now I'm going to type in roll back now, obviously I took the snapshot. Before that file was generated. So I'm going to go roll back, just let it go through the process rolling back, and then we'll head back to the file system. Okay. Now, in theory, what should be happening is that file should be being removed.

Okay. Cancel. Test, and is Okay, so you've now just got data on so remember, I created data too.

There's some stuff in it. We rolled back the snapshot. It went back to that point in time where we took the snapshot that. A very simple way of doing it. Okay? So if we go one step further, if we do something ever so slightly different, so I'm just going to go and create another file. I'll call this data two again. Now remember, we rolled back, so data two doesn't exist anymore. If we'd have taken another snapshot, it will be in that snapshot. But data two doesn't really exist anymore, so let's go data two again.

Let's put some stuff in it. I'll just save that back, and let's take another snapshot. Okay, so I'm going to do this manually. So head to storage and then file systems. Remember, just go to the little camera icon, click on snapshot, and let's call this second. snap shot, and we will make it mutable again. Okay? We'll stick with one day, see if we can be better at copying this time, and I can copy, paste and take the snapshot,so that second snapshot now contains that file, which is data too.

Okay. So let's prove the point. So if we go to Data Protection snapshots, there should now be two snapshots in here. Okay. Now, if you're scheduled into run kind of once every even then, obviously, you know, when you come in the morning, whatever, you'll see the snapshots kind of growing and building. So there it is. So we know that that's the first snapshot and that's the second snapshot. I'd labeled them. Well, now you'll notice this here, now doesn't have the rollback option. Okay, there's no rollback for that. Now, it's only the latest snapshot that you can quickly through the GUI roll back.

Now that's normally okay if I guess you get lucky and the incident or whatever has occurred, that means you need to roll back. Is timely, so that you can just roll back to the latest version. But if you do need to go back, all you need to do is click on the option to browse it. Okay? So if you click on Manage browsing, it will say, Okay. So we're going to create this file with this new file system, because what we're doing is we're mounting the snapshot for your server to be able to read from it. Okay, so in terms of this, let's just call this Dr, okay, how we want to expose it again?

With Unity, you get some good options. We can put this out to kind of Windows Server. We can put it out to Linux, if we want to. And then let's just go to Browse. Okay, now it's mounted, what you'll see is you'll see these icons change. You'll have this little i, which is view properties. Okay, so again, under Data Protection snapshots, you'll see the snapshots that you have. Now this little i here, if you click on that, it's going to show you kind of the the mount point for what you've just created. So we can go ahead and copy that and we can mount that as a new file system. So that's pretty handy, right? Because you can do that to any kind of network server.

Okay, so if we go this PC, let's map a network drive. We can just paste that in, click on finish, done. So it's mounted that particular file system, and there it is. Okay, so the difference that's on live one, where we had data two, we added that, and then obviously we've rolled back, that's the second snapshot, and we've rolled back to what would be the first snapshot before data two was created. So you can do that, but remember, this is right. This is kind of read only, rather Okay, so I can't now come along and create an another file. It just won't let me.

Okay, permission denied, but that does allow you to read from it. You can then maybe copy that onto a particular, you know, device or drive that you want to Okay, so that's one thing that you can do. So as you can see, from that share, it's taken us back to the point in time where we did the first snapshot, and that was before we added data two. So this is the live environment. Data two is there, and we mounted snapshot one, which is before data two was there.

Okay, so that's obviously, you know, handy. If you need to roll back for any particular reason, you can then just, you know, blow the way, remove that if you've, if you've done, getting the files that you wanted from that point in time, copying them into the location that you want to that's absolutely fine, but there's other stuff we can do. So let's maybe turn this. Maybe do another let's maybe try another example. So what I'll do is, let's go into test. This is the live okay. So what we'll do here is, let's create a file that we need. Okay, so we need, we need this.

Okay, so let's, again, just put some data in there, just so you know that it's for real. It is real. We'll save that back. Then we'll save Okay, so let's go ahead and. Create another snapshot. So we go storage file systems, take a snapshot of that file system. This one is the third snapshot. We'll make it immutable. Again. I'm to take the immutable snapshot. Let's head back to the snapshots we should now have the third one in there. And this is going to give you a good example of how the kind of the latest snapshot becomes the one that you can roll back.

Okay, so that is still mounted, so let's stop browsing that. We don't need that anymore, right? So I'm just going to type in the word stop and stop. You can see this is the latest one we did the third snapshot, and that is the one that you can quickly roll back. Okay, so let's stop browsing that one. That should mean that this falls away. This particular one should disappear.

There you go. That's gone, and we've still got our kind of live data. Okay, so in this example, what we'll try and do once it's stopped browsing is let's roll back. Yeah, let's roll back to the first snapshot again. What we'll do is we'll mount that again. So let's go manage browsing, and let's call this Dr do, and let's browse. Okay, so there we go.

So again, just click on the eye. It'll give you the amount point for it. Let's quickly copy that. Right click, copy head over to our file system. Drive, paste and finish. So remember, this is the first snapshot. Okay, so this is kind of the live environment. It's got all your files, yeah. So I guess in this example, it could be that maybe there's something you know wrong with one of these, or we want to try and start again so we could delete those.

So in this example, you see I've deleted some of the files. So that could be, you know, it could be malicious, could be accidental, or whatever it is, but let's say that those files are gone, but you have this mounted so you can get back to the point that you had the snapshot. But don't forget, this is read only, so you can't manipulate any of this data. So I can't open this and then change something, you know, because if I try and type in, but if I try and save that back, it's gonna, you know, it's gonna look like it's done. It's gonna try and let me save it into this particular, you know, day or two. But it just, it just won't let me, okay, access is tonight.

Okay, it's not going to lay this. That's the whole point. It's a mutable storage. So don't forget, you've mounted this. You know, this is read only. But if you wanted that data back, and you wanted to put that back into the live it's just simple as doing, you know, drag and drop, just put that into the live environment. So I can go back. Here's data on and now I can change things here.

Now, change this right? So now we're in the live environment. We've we've mounted the kind of the snapshot we wanted to get to. We can see the data we want. We can recover that data, and we can manipulate it and change it, because it's now on the live file system. So that hopefully kind of summarizes a couple of different ways to kind of make use of the snapshot technology. The key thing is to remember that it's just the latest one that you can roll back, and the others you can only mount. Okay, and don't forget, obviously, once you finish with it, to stop the browsing, so that you know it just removed from the server itself. But that's it on this one.

Thank you for listening, and I'll see you soon.
Thank you. Bye.