Techniques are provided for selectively allowing or blocking services from utilizing snapshots. A splitter intercepts and assigns timestamps to operations for execution upon files of a file system. If a snapshot is created while there are no pending operation, then the snapshot is tagged to indicate that the snapshot was created while there were no pending operations, and the snapshot is considered a tagged snapshot. Otherwise, the snapshot is not tagged, and is considered an untagged snapshot. Storage services (e.g., backup applications, lifecycle management applications, applications that consider timestamps of files, etc.) are allowed to utilize tagged snapshots and are blocked from utilizes untagged snapshots in order to maintain consistency.