Written by: Robert R. Russell on Friday, August 14, 2020.
Now that I can read and write a snapshot, how do I process a list of snapshots
in a useful manner? First, let me define what I mean by a useful manner. I want
the tool to keep a copy of all automatic snapshot on the source ZFS tree on the
destination tree as an automatic snapshot is aged off of the source it needs
to be aged off of the destination as well. It will transfer snapshots one at
a time instead of transferring all of the intermediate snapshots at the same
time; the ZFS send -i option versus the -I option.
The best data structure for this is a tree or graph. The tree starts with a list of yearly snapshots. Every snapshot has two slices of children—one for the child frequency snapshots older than it. The younger slice will be populated only if the current snapshot is the youngest child at its frequency strata. A picture demonstrating my idea follows this paragraph. I will delve into implementation details in the next part of the ZFS Backup Tool series.
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