Snapshot Types

Volume managers

Some Unix systems have snapshot-capable logical volume managers. These implement copy-on-write on entire block devices by copying changed blocks—​just before they are to be overwritten within "parent" volumes—​to other storage, thus preserving a self-consistent past image of the block device. Filesystems on such snapshot images can later be mounted as if they were on a read-only media.

Some volume managers also allow creation of writable snapshots, extending the copy-on-write approach by disassociating any blocks modified within the snapshot from their "parent" blocks in the original volume. Such a scheme could be also described as performing additional copy-on-write operations triggered by the writes to snapshots.

On Linux, Logical Volume Manager (LVM) allows creation of both read-only and read-write snapshots. Writable snapshots were introduced with the LVM version 2 (LVM2).^[1]

File systems

Some file systems, such as WAFL,^{[note 1]} fossil for Plan 9 from Bell Labs, and ODS-5, internally track old versions of files and make snapshots available through a special namespace. Others, like UFS2, provide an operating system API for accessing file histories. In NTFS, access to snapshots is provided by the Volume Shadow-copying Service (VSS) in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 and Shadow Copy in Windows Vista. Melio FS provides snapshots via the same VSS interface for shared storage.^[2] Snapshots have also been available in the NSS (Novell Storage Services) file system on NetWare since version 4.11, and more recently on Linux platforms in the Open Enterprise Server product.

EMC's Isilon OneFS clustered storage platform implements a single scalable file system that supports read-only snapshots at the file or directory level. Any file or directory within the file system can be snapshotted and the system will implement a copy-on-write or point-in-time snapshot dynamically based on which method is determined to be optimal for the system.

On Linux, the Btrfs and OCFS2 file systems support creating snapshots (cloning) of individual files. Additionally, Btrfs also supports the creation of snapshots of subvolumes. On AIX, JFS2 also support snapshots.

Sun Microsystems ZFS has a hybrid implementation which tracks read-write snapshots at the block level, but makes branched file sets nameable to user applications as "clones".

Time Machine, included in Apple's Mac OS X v10.5 operating system, is not a snapshotting scheme but a system-level incremental backup service: it merely watches mounted volumes for changes and copies changed files periodically to a specially-designated volume using hard links.

In virtualization

Virtualization environments host a guest operating system inside a virtual machine; some of them (including VMware, XenServer, VirtualBox, Parallels Desktop, QEMU and Virtual PC) can perform whole-system snapshots by dumping the entire machine state to a backing file, and redirecting future guest writes to a second file, which then acts as a copy-on-write table.