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Forum Discussion
Do Snapshots ever get deleted?
Hi All
I have 8TB of space on my readynas but only 500GB free so I need to free up some space. I plan to move old files to an external drive but if my understanding of how snapshots work this won't actually free up any space.
Do I have to manually go in and delete all the old snapshots?
It seems that monthly snapshots are kept forever so I have snapshots going back 5 years. Can't I change this so that a snapshot is only kept for a maximum of a year for example? At the moment it seems that it's impossible to actually delete something.
Thanks
2 Replies
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Roaders wrote:
It seems that monthly snapshots are kept forever so I have snapshots going back 5 years. Can't I change this so that a snapshot is only kept for a maximum of a year for example?
Yes. You change from "smart snapshots" to "custom snapshots". Then you can explicitly set up retention settings. I personally use 3 months for most shares.
My full settings are shown here:
These settings will make daily snapshots (at 11 pm) if the share has changed over the day, and will delete snapshots automatically after three months. I want to keep total snapshot use < 5% of the total volume usage - these settings generally keep it about 3%. But this depends a lot on how you use the NAS. You might need different retention settings.
I'm not sure if simply making the change will automatically delete your 5-year old snapshots or not. You could just make them, and check again tomorrow (after the 11 pm run), and see.
Though you can make multiple selections on the snapshot page and delete them all manually. It will take a bit of time for the space to free up.
Great, thanks for that. I'll try custom settings.
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