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Sometimes when you install a new OpenBSD snapshot, something is broken and you want to return to a previous snapshot.

If you are lucky there is still a mirror who hasn't synced to the latest version. Or perhaps you still have the install files from the previous snapshot somewhere.

But I wonder, is there perhaps some place on the internet, where old snapshot versions are archived? Some mirrors are still hosting extremely old versions of OpenBSD which probably nobody will use for production anymore, so a server who archives snapshots doesn't sound that unreasonable to me.

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You should probably not be using a snapshot of OpenBSD in production. Consider following the -stable branch of OpenBSD for production servers.

The snapshot releases of OpenBSD are done every now and again by Theo, and each snapshot represent a snapshot of the -current branch of the project. The snapshots are indeed sometimes broken, and are provided "as is", for bleeding edge people to cut themselves on.

I was following -current for more than a decade, and I found that rebuilding the system from sources, although it took longer time and required more work, provided me with a more stable experience than upgrading via snapshots.

My personal view is that snapshots are a good way to get up to speed with -current, but if you're wanting to follow -current, then you're better off compiling the system yourself, including ports.

I.e., find the latest snapshot, install it, then recompile the system from CVS sources. Then forget about snapshots and keep an eye on the -current FAQ, while periodically updating your CVS checkout and rebuilding.

Since syspatch(8) was introduced in OpenBSD 6.1, it's much easier to follow -stable (on amd64 and i386), which is what I'm currently doing on all my OpenBSD installations.

Kusalananda
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As of March 2018 an archive of few weeks of OpenBSD-current snapshots are available at:

https://ftp.hostserver.de/archive/

mkucharski
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