A technique enables creation and use of a writable, read-only snapshot of an active file system operating on a storage system, such as a multi-protocol storage appliance. The writable, read-only snapshot comprises a read-only "image" (file) residing in a snapshot and a writable virtual disk (vdisk) residing in the active file system. The writable vdisk is a "shadow" image of the snapshot file image and, as such, includes an attribute that specifies the snapshot file as a backing store.