Snapshot Explorer

Snapshot Explorer is a work-in-progress GTK-based application for browsing ZFS snapshots using the system file manager (e.g. Nautilus on GNOME).

It also includes a standalone Nautilus extension to enable easy restoration of earlier versions of a file from a ZFS snapshot.

Together these give an experience similar to Time Machine on macOS, the "Previous Versions" feature on Windows, or the TimeSlider Nautilus patches from OpenSolaris and its descendants -- all of which inspired this tool.

Snapshot Explorer is not:

• A ZFS snapshot scheduling tool. There are many available programs for this already. Snapshot Explorer should be able to work with snapshots created by any of them, or manually via the ZFS utilities.

• A general-purpose ZFS administration GUI. It is intended purely for exploring snapshots of locally-mounted filesystems.

Planned features:

• BTRFS support.

• Browsing of additional snapshots stored on an external/remote pool.

Building and Installation

You'll need the following dependencies, using Debian-style package names:

• libglib2.0-dev
• libgtk-3-dev
• libhandy-1-dev (for the application)
• libnautilus-extension-dev (for the Nautilus extension)
• meson
• valac

You will need ZFS filesystem(s) for this tool to be useful, but it has no dependencies on ZFS during installation.

On Linux, you will also need the userspace ZFS utilities (from zfsutils-linux) to actually see available snapshots in the UI.

Run meson build to configure the build environment, then run ninja in the new build directory to build:

meson build --prefix=/usr/local
cd build
ninja

You can pass -Denable-nautilus-extension=false to meson to disable building the Nautilus extension.

To install the application and possibly the extension, use ninja install, then execute snapshot-explorer:

sudo ninja install
snapshot-explorer