RN316 FW: 6.7.5 - Snapshots - Reclaiming Space

FWIW., snapshots have never misbehaved on my ReadyNAS. Though the older RN102 and RN202 were both factory reset about 9 months ago (right now I only use them for beta testing or checking issues I see reported here).

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Mook1 wrote:

 

What I've done is these commands via ssh:

 

# touch /.force_snapshots_upgrade
# systemctl restart readynasd

 

These commands are only needed if you have "invisible" snapshots that don't appear in the admin web ui.. If your volume is very old, then you might possibly have some.  If so, you just took care of it.

Overall, your symptoms sound a little different - you deleted snapshots sucessfully , but the space isn't being reclaimed.

Have you deleted shares recently?  One poster recently found that deletion wasn't 100% sucessful.  The share seemed to disappear, but the subvolume hadn't been fully destroyed (and it's snapshots were still there, taking up space).  You can check for that with different ssh command: btrfs subvolume show /data  

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Mook1 wrote:

I am plagued with deleted snapshots that won't recover space on my systems.

 

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One aspect is that when you do delete snapshots, you generally only get space back when you delete the oldest snapshots in the share.   So if you aren't following that practice, then try doing that.

If the space doesn't show up a little while after deletion, the next step is to run a balance.  I recommend using the volume maintenance scheduling feature - I schedule a balance every three months.

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Mook1 wrote:

 

If my backups are always current do I need snapshots?

 

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Probably not.  Snapshots let you recover older versions of the file, which is handy, but not absolutely essential.  Some share really shouldn't use snapshots (a share for torrent downloading is one common example).  If you have a lot of file updates, you end up with lots of snapshot storage and a highly fragmented main share.

FWIW, I don't use the "SMART" snapshots.  I use "custom" snapshots, with "

• "Only take snapshots with changes" set
• "Allow snapshot access" clear.
• "Allow access to windows previoius versions" set

I normally set retention to 3 months - though I do set it a lot smaller on my PC backup share.  If snapshot space usage seems to grow too much, I either manually delete a few of the oldest, or adjust the retention downwards.

At the moment I have about 9 TB of data on the volume, with about 300 GB of snapshots.