Comment by lazide

You can’t ZFS import a pool on a drive detached this way without things happening to that drive, is the issue. So if you want a point in time archive, it’s dangerous to do that.

I think it’s nearly impossible to actually ZFS import a pool from just a single detached drive too if the original is nuked, but I imagine there is some special magic operation that might make it possible.

Splitting the new disk off into it’s own pool doesn’t have any of these issues, and is a much cleaner way to handle it.