We are migrating from core to scale and setting up mirror infrastructure. We have a vm connect to a dataset via nfs and have the snapshot directory visible and snapdev also visible.
But when we ls -al the directory it is empty:
ls -al /mnt/mydataset/.zfs/snapshot/manual-2025-12-11_12-38/ total 0 drwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 0 Dec 11 12:38 . drwxrwxrwx. 40 root root 2 Dec 11 12:38 ..
The expectation is that there would be data here that is viewable but read only. We seen to have the same setup working with core.
NFS shares are per filesystem/dataset. Since snapshots are technically separate filesystems you cannot access them via the mount of their parent. This is a property of a sharing protocol that predates ZFS by decades.
We added a special enterprise-only configurable feature for the NFS server in 25.04 and later where we have knfsd automount the snapshots and expose them via exportfs.
That caught me off guard. It’s unfortunate that I learned this fact yesterday, just a few weeks after I finally found some time to upgrade my home NAS from CORE to SCALE. Did I miss some announcement/documentation regarding the removal of this feature from TrueNAS community edition?
I’m running a small network at home for my family with Linux and macOS NFS clients and have in the past relied on snapshots being available on these systems. I’m aware that I could use SMB shares where snapshots are still accessible (at least in Goldeye) but that does not feel right and seems to be a technical inferior solution for UNIX-like OSes.
Does this really mean that I would need a full enterprise license to get this (in my eyes rudimentary) feature back?
Thanks for clarifying. Given the price tag I’d expect, I definitely would not seriously consider purchasing an enterprise license for my small home setup, regardless of the hardware. A reasonable-priced feature purchase might be an option, though, but there doesn’t seem to be anything like that…
There’s been some discussion about making stand alone licences available, but there’s no definite answer wether it will actually happen, or when it might happen…
I don’t think so. If you did then I did too. Seems a shame that a feature that worked in CORE is now only available to Enterprise. I guess that’s another reason for users to stay on CORE for a little while longer unless they need SCALE/CE features.
Staying on CORE was not an option for me since I’ve been running various jails with software like Nextcloud whose updates required a more up-to-date userland…
Anyway, the more I think about a basic feature like the snapshot availability via NFS being silently dropped the more worried I get because I’m wondering what will happen next. Will the number of shares be limited in a future CE release? Maybe NFS shares will be considered an “enterprise feature” at some point, leaving just the SMB service?
Probably I’m too pessimistic regarding CE’s future but it seems to me I should prepare myself to “downgrade” my NAS to some standalone OS, managing that manually along with some containers. In fact, that’s what I’m doing at my job and meant to avoid for my setup at home. Although returning to where I started 3 decades ago has a certain charming quality, I’ve to admit…
Thanks to both of you for the pointers! Generally I’d prefer some Linux-based OS since that’s what I’m used to from my work (my main BSD experiences ended some time ago with the switch from SunOS 4 to 5 and were revived when starting with FreeNAS in 2020)…
But I’ll take a deeper look as soon time permits although I’m still hoping that abandoning TrueNAS won’t be necessary. I’ve come to really like the great community here.
Did I miss some announcement/documentation regarding the removal of this feature from TrueNAS community edition?