I’m thinking about implementing a zfs snapshot scheme that takes a snapshot at regular intervals and then destroys it if zfs diff shows no difference from the previous snapshot. Some of my datasets only have infrequent changes, so the result would be a relatively sparse set of snapshots. However, any file system changes that span the snapshot interval would be retained indefinitely.
With the typical frequent/daily/monthly/yearly scheme, changes that are made and reverted within, say a month, could easily be lost when the more frequent snapshots are automatically destroyed.
I actually had a problem where a user made a large number of file changes over a weekend and then a poorly considered zfs rollback lost all of this work.
I feel like I’m at odds with accepted thinking on this, so I would like to hear from more experienced people about what problems I might have with my proposed scheme.