To run zfSnap periodically you can add these options to your /etc/periodic.conf xPERIODICx_zfsnap_enable - Enable xPERIODICx snapshots (values: YES | NO) xPERIODICx_zfsnap_fs - Space separated zfs filesystems to create non-recursive snapshots xPERIODICx_zfsnap_recursive_fs - Space separated zfs filesystems to create recursive snapshots xPERIODICx_zfsnap_ttl - Set Time To Live xPERIODICx_zfsnap_verbose - Verbose output (values: YES | NO) xPERIODICx_zfsnap_flags - zfSnap generic flags (except -v and -d) xPERIODICx_zfsnap_enable_prefix - Create snapshots with prefix (Default = YES) xPERIODICx_zfsnap_prefix - Set prefix to use for new snapshots (Default = "xPERIODICx-") (where xPERIODICx is any of hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, reboot) xPERIODICx_zfsnap_delete_enable - Delete old snapshots periodically (values: YES | NO) xPERIODICx_zfsnap_delete_flags - zfSnap generic flags (except -v and -d) xPERIODICx_zfsnap_delete_verbose - Verbose output (values: YES | NO) xPERIODICx_zfsnap_delete_prefixes - Space separated list of prefixes of old zfSnap snapshots to delete 'hourly-', 'daily-', 'weekly-', 'monthly-' and 'reboot-' prefixes are hard-coded (where xPERIODICx is any of daily, weekly, monthly) Add these lines to your /etc/crontab 4 * * * * root periodic hourly @reboot root periodic reboot NOTE: it is not recommended to delete zfSnap snapshots every hour. Deleting zfs snapshots takes more time than creating them. There for it's better to delete snapshots once per day... Periodic scripts provide very limited feature set. If you want to use more advanced setup, you need to call zfSnap from crontab directly. This way you can combine all sort of parameter combinations. Don't forget to check https://github.com/graudeejs/zfSnap/wiki for more info. Feedback welcomed: graudeejs@gmail.com