Help Understanding "Promoting" a dataset

[winnielinnie]

@helojunkie

I got the instructions right here out of the TrueNAS manual, not from AI

Oh my. That’s not a good look.

Recovering files from a snapshot is easy. It can be done by navigating with a desktop’s file browser to the hidden folder named “.zfs/snapshot” and then browse the snapshots as if they are normal folders with all available files within each one.

You don’t need to clone, promote, mount, or create any new SMB shares.

That advice from the TrueNAS guide is questionable, especially if they don’t lead with the easier method.

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@helojunkie

This is what I see when I run the command you provided.

According to that, the dataset vol1/nextcloud_files is actually a clone that depends on a snapshot of another dataset named vol1/nextcloud_files-auto-2024-12-17_06-30-clone. Ironically, the dataset with “-clone” in the name is not actually a clone.

There are Inception levels of cloning and promoting going on. I’m not really sure how you ended up with that, unless it was by mistake.

You can try to promote vol1/nextcloud_files and then report the results of the above command again.

I would create a checkpoint of your pool before continuing.