Where is all the data stored in my snapshots? .zfs/snapshot subdirectories are empty.

[KevDog]

It's likely I'm doing something wrong, but I'm very perplexed why .zfs/snapshots folders are empty.

Further explanation
I have a Snapshot task set on the main pool to take recursive snapshots every 12 hours:

It appears the scheduler is working to create the snapshots as intended (I've just included an example from one of the datasets):

Because the snapshot is of the entire zpool, many of the datasets represent the drive structure for running VM's

My problem however is that the snapshot subdirectories are in fact empty. For example:

That's a directory listing of all the snapshots for this particular dataset. The dataset represents a running VM. A number of manual and auto and manual snapshots are within the directory.

Within each snapshot directory however there are no contents within the directories themselves:

That's just a small snippet.

I even made two manual snapshots of the running VM after creating a new directory and empty file, yet the subdirectories are listed as empty:

So my question -- Where is all changed data reside?

 

[kdragon75]

Your VMs are using vdevs right? You won't see the content of the disk image. It's has its own File system. Try looking at a snapshot of a file share or your jails and you should see the files. Without double checking, this seems normal to me.

 

[garm]

You won’t be able to browse snapshots of block devices used by VMs. Those need to be cloned and mounted with the corresponding VMs

 

[KevDog]

So Vdevs are viewable -- and what I mean by this is not to view the actual contents -- but there isn't any record of the block device listed anywhere?

Ok -- I went ahead and cloned the VM zol, and then went ahead and mounted the partitions via the linux install CD. I needed to do a few things in order to mount the partitions (since one was zfs, the other vfat32), but yea I see the old files.

So I just want to be clear -- there isn't any way to tell if there is a change of the "block device" used by the VM. I'd like to avoid individually cloning/mounting snapshots that are the same.

 

[kdragon75]

I'm sorry, when I said vdevs I meant zvol.... Wow that was a derp!