Restore only several files from ZFS snapshot without creating copy of them?

[Eric A. Borisch]

On Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 4:24 PM,  <kpneal at pobox.com> wrote:
> But can a clone be promoted to the "head" of a dataset? I thought a clone
> was always backed by a snapshot. The goal as I understood it was to get
> the files back into the normal dataset.

>From man zfs:

 zfs promote clone-filesystem

         Promotes a clone file system to no longer be dependent on its "ori-
         gin" snapshot. This makes it possible to destroy the file system that
         the clone was created from. The clone parent-child dependency rela-
         tionship is reversed, so that the origin file system becomes a clone
         of the specified file system.

What you will lose in the process is the snapshot history between the
'pre whoops' snapshot and 'now.' (After recreating the state of 'now'
in the clone of 'pre whoops' (less the accidental removals) via rsync,
for example.)

  - Eric