Imagine you could snapshot yourself and generate a clone from that snapshot. On the surface, that would seem like a cool idea, but scratch the surface and you quickly run into problems. These problems could be ethical (what rights does your clone have to your own possessions?), or they could be practical (how can the planet sustain the population explosion?). Fortunately, with zfs datasets, snapshotting and cloning not only are permitted, they are actively encouraged.

Over at the Xerces Tech site, a recent article outlines how to use zfs clones in order to safely do an apt-get on their Nexenta box. Take a look at the article called Unbreakable upgrades, ZFS and apt-get to see how it's done.