With ZFS snapshots and Samba’s shadow_copy2 module, you can expose snapshots to Windows clients as shadow copies.

First, install zfs-auto-snapshot on Debian:

apt-get install zfs-auto-snapshot

Default configuration for zfs-auto-snapshot uses specific labels like daily, weekly etc. This is incompatible to samba’s expected snapshot format. As a good workaround, instead of using text labels, I’ve changed the labels to numbers:

This generates snapshot names like:

storage/datapool/support@zfs-auto-snap_05-2017-09-01-1045

Now it is possible to use the label as input for the shadow copy timestamp:

shadow: format = zfs-auto-snap_%S-%Y-%m-%d-%H%M

The “label” which is always an integer, is now used as second (%S) part which is (mostly) negligible for shadow copies.

The required changes for smb.conf are:

[global]
    vfs objects = shadow_copy2
    shadow: snapdir = .zfs/snapshot
    shadow: sort = desc
    shadow: format = zfs-auto-snap_%S-%Y-%m-%d-%H%M
    shadow:localtime = no

I’ve modified the installed cronjob files for numeric labels:

# tail -vn +1 /etc/cron.*/zfs-auto-snapshot
==> /etc/cron.daily/zfs-auto-snapshot <==
#!/bin/sh
exec zfs-auto-snapshot --quiet --syslog --label=31 --keep=7 //

==> /etc/cron.d/zfs-auto-snapshot <==
PATH="/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin"

*/5 7-21 * * * root zfs-auto-snapshot -q -g --label=05 --keep=12  //

==> /etc/cron.hourly/zfs-auto-snapshot <==
#!/bin/sh
exec zfs-auto-snapshot --quiet --syslog --label=24 --keep=24 //

==> /etc/cron.monthly/zfs-auto-snapshot <==
#!/bin/sh
exec zfs-auto-snapshot --quiet --syslog --label=12 --keep=3 //

==> /etc/cron.weekly/zfs-auto-snapshot <==
#!/bin/sh
exec zfs-auto-snapshot --quiet --syslog --label=52 --keep=4 //