Free Nas Snapshots gone after unit has been stored for several months

[NicklowiczComputers LLC]

So my nas was loaded with 11.0 when it first came out. It sense then has been powered off (few months). well I powered it on, Got it on the network, and did the updates. I had to fix a jail (not a big deal) but otherwise everything was back and running. My problem is I went to show someone how freenas snapshots work, and all the prior snapshots are gone. I think the answer is because Freenas is set to keep them for 2 weeks and obviously it has been not powered to create, delete, or manage these.. But this is the reason for my post. Being it wasn't running its normal schedule as the weeks went by, what happened to them? did it just say wow i am past the point of time for all the old snapshots and just deleted them? letting it go for a day I can see a set of new ones with respect to the first hour it was running, so I know the snapshots are running, but want to know because I am wondering how freenas handles them when it has no activity. Would suck if the old ones aren't showing up, yet still using space. if this didn't teach me one good rule, Snapshots are no substitute for a backup as when I took it down to move, I was recovering misc stuff from the snapshots in windows by right clicking and going to the prior versions.. but any info on how these work under this circumstance would be great

Ken

 

[SweetAndLow]

If the time for the snapshot retention policy has past then they get deleted. That is what the retention policy is for.

 

[Ericloewe]

If you wanted to preserve the snapshots on a pool after a long quiescence, the best option would be to boot into vanilla FreeBSD and do whatever you want with them. FreeNAS' behavior is to delete all expired snapshots when a snapshot task runs.