I'm having trouble freeing up some space on my company's ReadyNAS 4312. I'm wondering if there might be some data that I'm not thinking of that I couild safely delete? We currently back up users' files to the ReadyNAS, but I don't think they take up enough space to fill up 27TB. Are there some temporary files/caches that I could clear out? Thanks for any help!
I'm having trouble freeing up some space on my company's ReadyNAS 4312. I'm wondering if there might be some data that I'm not thinking of that I couild safely delete? We currently back up users' files to the ReadyNAS, but I don't think they take up enough space to fill up 27TB. Are there some temporary files/caches that I could clear out? Thanks for any help!
Do you have snapshots enabled on any shares? If you do, then I'd start by deleting the oldest. If the shares are set up to use "smart" snapshots, then I suggest changing to "custom" and explicitly limiting retention.
Once you deleted old snapshots, then you might need to run a balance from the volume settings wheel to reclaim the space.
Unfortunately I don't have any snapshots. I am currently doing a volume scrub and will try a volume balance after that. I am running firmware version 6.9.2. I know that's old, but I have a separate issue where I can't get the NAS online to download firmware updates. Thanks for the help; I will post the results when I have them.
You say you have no snapshots. By default, they are on when you create a share, so you are sure you disabled them?
What is the error message you are getting? Make sure it's about the user space (usually volume /data), not the system partition, which is an entirely different problem.
Do you have any iSCSI LUNs that are also taking up space?
I was mistaken, it seems each of the shares has one snapshot. I tried deleting one but I got a message saying "Failed to delete the snapshot." I have no iSCSI LUNs set up. Balancing the volumes didn't free up any space. I'm not getting any other error messages, but the overview screen shows that I have 35GB free of 27TB. That just doesn't seem right to me, unless maybe the Windows backups are not being deleted? I have users' files backed up to the NAS through Windows backup. But I thought they deleted the oldest ones after a certain point.
Windows backup does delete old backups, but how and when it decides to do that is not configurable and is a complete mystery. If you are going to use it in a multi-user backup scenario, I recommend you do so with each computer going to a different share and that you have share quotas set such that the total does not exceed the size of the volume. Frankly, there are a lot better progams you can use. @StephenB and I both use Acronis True Image, but there are others. It's still a good idea to have separate shares and quotas in any multi-user backup scenario, but at least the alternatives are more configurable.
Note that starting with the 2020 version, the file structure used by Acronis is not the best if you also have snapshots turned on for your NAS. There is a convoluted way around it (detailed on their forum), but you don't really need to worry since you don't intend to have snapshots enabled.
Okay, I've learned that Windows backups are saved for a year. I would like to try deleting backups older than 3 months, but I'm unable to do so in ReadyNAS or in Windows. In ReadyNAS, I right-click a given folder and select Delete and I get no error messages, but the folder is still there. This is really confusing; I don't get why I seem unable to delete anything.
Okay, I've learned that Windows backups are saved for a year. I would like to try deleting backups older than 3 months, but I'm unable to do so in ReadyNAS or in Windows. In ReadyNAS, I right-click a given folder and select Delete and I get no error messages, but the folder is still there. This is really confusing; I don't get why I seem unable to delete anything.
If you are trying to delete a snapshot, you need to do that from the Web Admin UI. You can't do it from Windows.
Okay, after restarting the NAS i was able to delete some old backups and free up some space. I might have to restart again sometime because after deleting a couple terabytes' worth of data it has stopped deleting again. However, I['m in a much better position now than I was. Thanks for your help, both of you!
