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Confused about Snapshot Retention
The wording on the Snapshot Dialog box confuses me -- see below.
Are hourly snapshots ‘promoted’ to daily and then is that ‘daily’ promoted to ‘weekly’ and then is that ‘weekly’ promoted to monthly??
I may be reading this incorrectly so what is the real deal?
In particular will daily snapshots get erased at the end of two days or will they keep hanging around?
Digital999 wrote:
The wording on the Snapshot Dialog box confuses me -- see below.
In particular will daily snapshots get erased at the end of two days or will they keep hanging around?
As it says, daily snapshots are kept for 4 weeks. Although they use the word "promotion", another way to think about it is that a snapshot taken at midnight on Friday is just a weekly snapshot (and a snapshot taken at midnight on the last day of the month is just a monthly snapshot).
The fact that the monthly snapshots are kept forever is a real drawback - eventually the volume fills, and you need to manually delete them. I always recommend switching to the custom snapshots, which let you explicitly set retention. You lose the pruning of old hourly, daily, and weekly - but you can set the custom snapshots so they are only saved when the share has changed since the previous snapshot. IMO that's more useful than a bunch of identical snapshots.
One important thing that the screenshot doesn't tell you is that when "allow snapshot access" is checked the snapshots can be changed by anyone with write access to the share. No idea why Netgear did that - but I think it was a huge mistake. If you want to ensure that you can roll back to the share contents at an earlier point in time you need to turn that setting off. You'll still be able to use the previous version feature of windows.
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Digital999 wrote:
The wording on the Snapshot Dialog box confuses me -- see below.
In particular will daily snapshots get erased at the end of two days or will they keep hanging around?
As it says, daily snapshots are kept for 4 weeks. Although they use the word "promotion", another way to think about it is that a snapshot taken at midnight on Friday is just a weekly snapshot (and a snapshot taken at midnight on the last day of the month is just a monthly snapshot).
The fact that the monthly snapshots are kept forever is a real drawback - eventually the volume fills, and you need to manually delete them. I always recommend switching to the custom snapshots, which let you explicitly set retention. You lose the pruning of old hourly, daily, and weekly - but you can set the custom snapshots so they are only saved when the share has changed since the previous snapshot. IMO that's more useful than a bunch of identical snapshots.
One important thing that the screenshot doesn't tell you is that when "allow snapshot access" is checked the snapshots can be changed by anyone with write access to the share. No idea why Netgear did that - but I think it was a huge mistake. If you want to ensure that you can roll back to the share contents at an earlier point in time you need to turn that setting off. You'll still be able to use the previous version feature of windows.
Thanks
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