It seems that LXD use symlinks to link container directories to Zfs., but when lxd or a container is down there is no easy way to get to files in the container.
Are the original files available otherwise outside of LXD/LXC.
LXD creates a ZFS dataset for each container.
This zfs dataset is isually under /var/lib/lxd/containers/<container>/rootfs
If the zfs dataset is mounted you should be able to see it with zfs list and mount it with zfs mount
If you have snap you need to do some extra tricks to use zfs inside of the lxd namespace and see the zfs storage:
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/snap/lxd/current/zfs-0.8/lib /snap/lxd/current/zfs-0.8/bin/zfs list
Also the storage of th containers is mounted under /var/snap/lxd/common/lxd/containers/<container>/rootfs
We don’t mount stopped containers as every entry in your mount table makes parsing it slightly slower, so there’s no reason to keep stuff mounted when we’re not using them.
I appreciate your answer. I believe there should be a fall back mode to access containers with the them down that is more user friendly, just a thought.
Thanks, I was able to do a simple backup of my containers most important part with a simple bash file…
fs mount local/containers/$1
cp -RLv /var/lib/lxd/storage-pools/local/containers/$1/rootfs/var/ /mnt/md0/backup/$1