illumos gate

The idea of Storage Pool Checkpoint (aka zpool checkpoint) deals with exactly that. It can be thought of as a “pool-wide snapshot” (or a variation of extreme rewind that doesn’t corrupt your data).
It remembers the entire state of the pool at the point that it was taken and the user can revert back to it later or discard it. Its generic use case is an administrator that is about to perform a set of
destructive actions to ZFS as part of a critical procedure. She takes a checkpoint of the pool before performing the actions, then rewinds back to it if one of them fails or puts the pool into an
unexpected state. Otherwise, she discards it. With the assumption that no one else is making modifications to ZFS, she basically wraps all these actions into a “high-level transaction”.