Dell PowerFlex Secure Snapshots

A post by Anuraj PD

Secure snapshots are snapshots on which we can assign expiration time and the snapshot cannot be modified or deleted until the expiration time is reached. This feature will help the customers meet compliance requirements in various situations by preventing the accidental or intentional deletion of the snapshots. You can read more from here.

Create a secure snapshot by going to Blocks -> Select Volume -> More Actions -> Create Snapshot

Enable the Secure Snapshot option during creation and configure expiration time.

Delete option is grayed out for the secure snapshot in GUI, also the command to delete the secure snapshot will fail if tried to delete a secure snapshot.

Secure snapshot is also supported with snapshot policy, this will enable us to schedule the creation of secure snapshots.

Create snapshot policy by going to Protection -> Snapshot Policy -> Create Snapshot Policy and enable the secure snapshot option.

Once the snapshot policy is created assign the source volume to the policy.

List of secure snapshots created by the snapshot policy.

We can also enable secure snapshot on the already existing snapshot by using the cli. So, for that we are creating a snapshot without enabling secure snapshot and use the cli to set the expiration time on the snapshot.

Verify from the list of the volumes the expiration is not set on the snapshot then, enable the secure snapshot on the existing snapshot by configuring the expiration time.

It is also possible to change the expiration on the secure snapshot, we can only extend the expiration time and not possible to reduce the expiration time.