Cloudera Docs

Using HDFS snapshots for data protection

HDFS snapshots enable you to capture point-in-time copies of the file system and protect your important data against user or application errors. Cloudera recommends that you take snapshots of specified subtrees on the file system.

Using snapshots to protect data is efficient because of the following reasons:
  • Snapshot creation is instantaneous regardless of the size and depth of the directory subtree.
  • Snapshots capture the block list and file size for a specified subtree. Snapshots do not create extra copies of blocks on the file system.

You can either use the command-line interface or Cloudera Manager to manage HDFS snapshots.