I recently had reason to write a tool to replay some of the ZFS snapshot history of a server. I wanted to merge two old volumes into three new volumes in order to have their snapshot retainment schedules better match their content. The bulk of that is a story for another time.

To be efficient, the tool needed to be able to track files as they were changed through snapsnots and "replay" those changes. An early idea was to match up inodes (and e.g. compare ctimes, etc.), but as I started testing the tool I noticed that there were occasionally inode pairs that did not make sense; files in one snapshot had the same inode as directories in a later one.

Only then did it click that inodes are recycled, and matching inodes alone was not enough.

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