Restore encrypted offsite backup to unencrypted pool

Just to make sure.

  1. You have an unencrypted dataset on your main pool
  2. You want to keep it unencrypted
  3. You want to have regular incremental backups from this main pool’s (unencrypted) dataset sent over to another pool’s (encrypted) dataset
  4. You want to be able to rollback the main dataset to an earlier snapshot… and then “restore” (incrementally) from the backup dataset?

Why? In what situation would you intentionally rollback a dataset… only to have it rolled “forward” again from a backup source? Why rollback in the first place?

The main dataset will always dictate the snapshots and their orders, because you’ll never be using the backup dataset directly as a filesystem actively being written to. The moment you do that, it’s no longer a destination dataset for backups. (See the fourth flowchart in this post.)