Sanoid

Sanoid is a policy-driven snapshot management system for ZFS that automates creation, rotation, and health checks of snapshots across datasets. You describe retention in human terms—hourly, daily, monthly, yearly—via simple templates, and Sanoid enforces those rules consistently without manual cron gymnastics. It sets and respects ZFS properties, places holds to protect in-use snapshots, and surfaces health issues so you notice problems before recovery time. Paired with its sibling syncoid, it also handles local and remote replication of incremental snapshots over SSH, supporting resume tokens, bandwidth shaping, and common accelerators like mbuffer. The design favors safety and observability: dry-run modes, verbose logging, and conservative defaults reduce the risk of accidental data loss. In production, Sanoid turns ZFS’s powerful but low-level primitives into dependable, auditable data protection for everything from home labs to multi-tenant servers.