On Mon, 24 Aug 2020, at 17:47, stripes theotoky wrote:
> If I understand you all the problems are ZFS is choking because I don't
> have enough disk space. The reason I don't have enough disk space is
> because the files I deleted are still in the old snapshots, plus it was
> already pretty full.
that's my understanding, yes.
> This seems like a good way forward but is it really and if so how do I
> do it?
see below for creating an offline copy of your data first, but the command you will need to remove snapshots will be of the form
zfs destroy <dataset>@<snapshot>
I think you already have something similar to this, but to identify which snapshots you have, use
zfs list -t all
the snapshots are those with the '@' in their name. When destroying these, work from the oldest forward
> First things first ZFS is choking due to lack of disk space. However, I
> have a lot of totally unused diskspace on a windows partition so how
> can I reduce the windows partition and increase the ZFS to stop it
> choking. It has 560GB of which I do not need more than 200max to leave
> for Windoze.
I'd not be contemplating doing this until you had an offline copy of your data somewhere first. Whilst zfs can grow, it can't shrink and I'm not familiar enough with windows to advise there, but it certainly seems possible
> Gparted apparently doesn't like ZFS but does this matter? I can I
> assume use it to shrink the Windows partition and free up about 360GB,
> then how do I expand the ZFS to use that free space?
I'm hesitant to advise here, because I don't think we have a good knowledge of your disk layout ... I have vague recollections that you might also have LVM on there somewhere and also an SD card? Did you provide a list of drives and what's on them earlier? I might have missed that, sorry
> Second, I have checked /etc/cron and find auto snap shot commands for
> hourly, daily, weekly & monthly
> hourly = 24, daily = 31, weekly = 8, monthly = 6. It seems I could
> change that to hourly = 24, daily = 7, weekly = 4, monthly = 6 and get
> pretty much the same coverage with a lot less snapshots.
yeah, I don't have it on hand, but that was a similar realisation I came to when I reviewed it last
> Listing snapshots shows some from 2019, where are they coming from as
> with monthly only storing 6 months there shouldn't be anything newer
> than February 2020 or am I not understanding something here?
that I'm not sure of, but from the sounds of it those might be good candidates to remove first as they'll likely be referencing blocks that are in the oldest versions of the files in your zpool
> The computer is a Lenovo W541 laptop, the longer term plan is to double
> the memory to 32GB and put a 2TB SSD in this box. Does that sound
> sensible?
ZFS eats memory, so the more the better and certainly more disk space is required given your current experiences ...
there seem to be many variants of your laptop though - does yours have two drive bays or just the one with a DVD drive? I'd recommend keeping your OS and data segregated as much as possible and having it on another drive gives you better recovery options when one or the other fails, so maybe losing the DVD drive and replacing with an HDD or SDD for data might be something to contemplate ... not sure whether you might still be able to get the drive bay blank any longer, but it's probably on ebay somewhere
> In the meantime, a thorough backup is running in at least two external
> drives (one incremental and one fresh).
ok ... even so, if you have a spare external drive of at least the same capacity as your current zpool (2x would be best), I would recommend creating a new zpool on the entire disk purely for making large scale changes easier in the future. as you have snapshots being created automatically for you, that's most of the work done in being able to do zfs-level backups into another zpool - once that's created, you can use zfs send and zfs receive to push data between the two pools as required ... this would preserve the structure and snapshots as per your original zpool ... a few more moving parts, but it's not intended as an archive so much as a point-in-time backup to get you out of a jam at the moment.
anyway, that's enough from me - hope this has helped, will keep a closer eye on the mailing list if you need further suggestions