Snapshots provide frozen images of the file systems.
Such frozen images are associated with a certain time. SnapFS is an enhancement for Linux journal file systems such as Ext3 to provide snapshots. SnapFS is efficient and imposes minimal space and execution overhead. SnapFS provides features similar to those offered by NetApp's WAFL file system, or the Veritas file system, but has a completely different architecture. SnapFS is derived from the snapshot module in the Lustre project and from the filtering and journal recovery used in InterMezzo .