Cherry picking files from snapshots

OpenZFS
1

Curious how other people do this.

If it’s on the live system it’s not difficult, just copy the file into the old location from the .zfs/snapshots hidden directory.

But it gets trickier if it’s a file that was deleted some time ago, and only exists on the backup host.

I try not to have too many things running on the backup server, though I suppose SCP is an option if you’re able to have SSH listening.

2

Take a look at GitHub - kimono-koans/httm: Interactive, file-level Time Machine-like tool for ZFS/btrfs/nilfs2 (and even Time Machine and Restic backups!)

I think the easiest way would be to use something like this to save all the required files into a /tmp location on the backup server and then scp/rsync it out to where you need in one shot.