Gracefully restart RN104?

mdgm and I don't quite agree on the "limit snapshots on the RN100" concept. It seems to me that the impact of snapshots on file system fragmentation is the same for all NAS models. I think mdgm's view is that performance impact of the fragmentation (and the defrag) is worse on the lower performing NAS, He could well be right - I'm just not seeing it quite the same way.

Where we agree is

-The value of snapshots is that you can restore older versions or accidentally deleted files.
-The challenges arise on files that are modified frequently - if you are adding/deleting/moving entire files, CoW doesn't create more fragmentation.
-That you do need to be thoughtful about snapshot settings (and take them into account as you organize your data).

Its not so much about which files are most important, its more about what you do with them. For shares where you add files, but don't usually edit them or delete them, snapshots do no harm, and could help if you accidentally delete things - so (in my opinion) you might as well enable them.

For shares where the files are heavily modified (torrent downloads, SQL databases, documents that are continually revised), you should keep snapshots off, and find some other way to archive old versions. Daily frontview backup to a second share is one way.

For shares where a lot of files are regularly deleted, snapshots quickly take a lot of disk space. One example is a folder of not-yet-watched videos, where you delete then as you watch them, For those shares you should probably keep them off, since if the volume becomes very full then performance certainly suffers a lot, and the NAS will begin automatically deleting snapshots anyway.