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Aspirant

Feb 04, 2018

Solved

Snapshots using 500GB but never turned on.....why? (And how to recover the space)

GUI showing 500GB of space being used by Snapshots (and it grows every day). I do not have snapshots turned on, have never had them turned on (to my knowledge), and cannot find any snapshots in the ...

low free space

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Snapshot space

StephenB
Feb 06, 2018
wrote:

I tried the "btrfs subvolume delete /data/BayBlueprint/.snapshots" but it gave me an error:

ERROR: cannot delete .......Directory not empty

I'll need to figure out if I can force a delete or recursively delete.

Each folder in /data/BayBlueprint/.snapshots is a subvolume, so I guess you do need to delete those. Try deleting one of them - for instance btrfs subvolume delete /data/BayBlueprint/.snapshots/5/snapshot

There is no recursive delete option, though I guess you could try to build a script. If you don't have too many, it's probably easiest to just change the /5/ to another snapshot index and redoing the command.

StephenB

Guru - Experienced User

Feb 04, 2018

A brute-force approach is to back up the data, do a factory reset, rebuild the NAS configuration and then restore the data from backup.

abruz

Aspirant

Feb 04, 2018

Thanks. That was my "Plan B" if this round of balance/defrag/scrub doesn't produce any results.

mdgm-ntgr
NETGEAR Employee Retired
Feb 05, 2018
What do you see for snapshots in btrfs.log?
- abruz
  Aspirant
  Feb 05, 2018
  It does have some entries pertaining to snapshot directories/files but I am not versed in deciphering this file (attached) so any help would be appreciated.
  
  I did putty/ssh into the system and thought I looked at all snapshot files/folders and found them all to be empty. It is possible I did not see the ".snapshots" entries. I will look at those specific files this evening when I have access to the system after work.
  
  Again, any insight to what my log file (attached) is telling me will be appreciated.
  
  Thanks........
  btrfs-log.pdf131 KB
  - StephenB
    Guru - Experienced User
    Feb 05, 2018
    It certainly tells you that you have snapshots, particularly in the BayBlueprint share. You should look in the web UI for those snapshots by
    
    going to the share page
    
    right-clicking on the BayBlueprint share, and selecting recover. You should see a bunch of folders with dates
    
    If you then select those folders right-click you will see a delete option.
    
    There are also a bunch of snapshots in the .purge folder (1517773986_Backup). My guess is that they are from failed backup jobs. If so, perhaps delete the source share of the backup and recreate it. If you want to preserve the contents, you can
    
    copy the files to temporary share
    
    delete the backup source share
    
    rename the temporary share to match the original backup source name.
    
    reset share access, etc to match the original configuration
    
    Note that if you want to delete snapshots via SSH you need to use the appropriate btrfs commands (not rmdir, etc)