Can ZFS be used like a virtual machine snapshot? Using, say, VirtualBox or VMM, I can snapshot a non-running VM before running and installing new software on it, and always revert back to a working configuration if I screw things up. Can I do this using ZFS?
I've seen plenty of examples of snapshotting my home directory which I can understand, but given the "fluid" nature of some of the files underneath root "/" is it unsafe to sudo zfs snapshot -r /@myrootsnapshot1
while the boot drive is mounted and Ubuntu is running?
And even more importantly, would a restore of such snapshot be safe? The objective is to snapshot before installing new software or trying out new configs, and roll back if I encounter problems.
If it's not safe, what is the recommended workflow for this objective?