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Forum Discussion
ReadyNAS snapshots
Can anyone please clarify how the snapshots are structured in ReadyNas OS? I see that when I create a snapshot is there in front view. If I have checked the box to "access the snapshot" (for ...
Yea thanks, I understand what snapshots generally are and how they work. I'm asking about the hidden directory called "/.snapshots" and another non-hidden directory called "/snapshot" that appears at the root level of my share. Please read my previous post again..no need to retype it all out now..
I suspect the prior response was AI generated.
If you set "Allow Windows Access" in the snapshot settings, you will see a lot of duplicated data. Also, that setting will change the permissions on the snapshot to Read/Write. That destroys the value of the snapshots for me, since it is far to easy to delete or modify the snapshot. You won't see those folders if you disable "Allow Windows Access". I do keep "Allow Access to Windows Previous Versions" set.
While we're on the subject of Settings... I do NOT recommend using the "Smart Snapshots" setting - instead I use custom snapshots with limited retention, and also set "only take snapshots with changes" The "smart snapshots" retain the monthly snapshots forever - which will eventually fill up the volume unless you periodically delete the oldest ones.
I don't know of any way to set up up the snapshots themselves to present just the changes. But you can use "btrfs send" to copy just the changes to a different folder. Keep in mind that the delta between the main share and each snapshot will increase over time, and more files will end up only in the snapshot when that happens. So if you wanted to automate a daily incremental backup, you'd need to create the snapshot at midnight, and use "btrfs send" to copy the incremental changes in that snapshot the following midnight to a different share. Then create a new snapshot the following day.
Thanks for that.
So when I unchecked the "Allow Snapshot Access" checkbox, it does remove the /snapshot dir, but the hidden dir called "/.snapshots" is still there, root owned at the root of the share.
It's like there are two parallel sets of hard links for the snapshots...one under /snapshot that is enabled by that checkbox in settings, and other that is always there. its extremely hidden, even using "ls -a" does not show it, but you can still cd into it and wala, there are are more hardlinks there.
So first question is, if I turn off "Allow Snapshot Access" is it safe to completely remove that '/.snapshots/" folder or is that that actual way that btrfs is creating the snapshots and they should never be removed? I am uncertain if that folder is related to snapshots entirely or related to the allow access feature.
Unfortunately idrive can still detect that super hidden .snapshots folder and unless I specifically be careful to exclude it, can end up filling up my idrive cloud quota very quickly...that's how I even found out about it.
I did not realize that using "Allow Snapshot Access" changed them to RW, for me that is enough reason to just turn that off period, and if I need to access a versioned file I will just do it through front view. But can I then remove that hidden .snapshots folder or is that fundamentally part of snapshots regardless of access?
I am not sure what that windows previous version checkbox is for, so I will not use it for now, and thanks for the heads up about custom snapshots, I will transition to that. Actually once I get local backups happening I am going to turn off snapshots on my main raid anyway and just use it on the local backup, at which point it would be fine to turn on snapshot access over there, etc..just to make it super simple to navigate to any version I want and get a file from the backup volume.
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