Snapshots are volume-based... there's no way to make a snapshot of a single file.

That said, the snapshot should be taken when the LUN is in a consistent\frozen state (especially true with databases residing within the LUN).

One way to accomplish this might be to utilize snapdrive to take the snapshot to ensure that the drive is consistent before taking the volume level snapshot. The end result will be that the single volume with many LUNs will also have many snapshots: one per LUN (unless snapdrive has multiple drives within the same volume, at which point snapdrive is smart enough to freeze them all).

Oh - and the retrieval of a LUN with snapdrive is via Single File Snap Restore, so you won't overwrite LUNs within the same volume that you are not restoring.

If you script this outside of snapdrive (as I'm assuming you would), you can make sure that any application is quiesced before taking the snapshot of the LUN (and name the snapshot something appropriate to said LUN), and for restores simply script the SFSR command as opposed to volume snap restore.

Either way, it would be best to do this from the server-side (whomever is connected to the LUN) for most optimal consistency\execution.

-----Original Message----- From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Robert Lazzurs Sent: Thursday, July 12, 2007 11:02 AM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: LUN Snapshots

Hello,

I was wondering if anyone is aware of a way to have a NetApp do snapshots of just one LUN within a volume, if not possibly one qtree within a volume.

The reason I ask is to provide a service where customers can have their iSCSI LUN and then backup that iSCSI LUN with a snapshot, however as I am going to have 100's of LUN's (well 1000's tbh, but this will be over many storage heads from the looks of things) I cannot assign a volume to each LUN.

If there is not a way to get a NetApp to provide these facilities then if someone has any recommendations on storage systems I should look at that would be great :)

(PS I love NetApp, please don't say I have to switch!!!)

Thanks.