Pool went from 80% full to 99% in a few weeks

[flyinfitz1]

Hi everyone,

First off, im in the process of increasing my pool storage from 4x3tb RAIDZ2 to 4x6tb RAIDZ2 but I have come across an issue. I recieved the customary alert that my storage was at 80% capacity. This was a few weeks ago. Since then the storage amount has increased from 80% to 99% as of today without adding much of anything as far as files go. Also, when i look at the pool in the GUI the total TB's used dont add up to the amount of storage the system says is being used. Any thoughts?

System: FreeNAS-11.3-U2

 

[flyinfitz1]

 

[jgreco]

Do you have snapshots or anything like that? A common mistake is that you have snapshots enabled and then maybe move something big from one dataset to another, or copy instead of moving within a dataset.

 

[flyinfitz1]

Do you have snapshots or anything like that? A common mistake is that you have snapshots enabled and then maybe move something big from one dataset to another, or copy instead of moving within a dataset.

I do. they automatically delete after two weeks. Im not sure that I did anything that would cause that much of an increase though. Ill check there though.

 

[K_switch]

I do. they automatically delete after two weeks. Im not sure that I did anything that would cause that much of an increase though. Ill check there though.

https://www.ixsystems.com/community/threads/snapshots-and-used-space.63810/
@flyinfitz1 The above link might be able to show total used space from your snapshots

 

[Heracles]

Hey Flyintfitz,

If you reserved some space for a dataset, that reserved space will me marked as used even when it is still empty. An empty dataset for which 1TB has been reserved will be measured as using 1 TB despite it actually contains 0.

 

[flyinfitz1]

Hey Flyintfitz,

If you reserved some space for a dataset, that reserved space will me marked as used even when it is still empty. An empty dataset for which 1TB has been reserved will be measured as using 1 TB despite it actually contains 0.

I checked and it didnt look like I reserved any space on the data sets.

 

[flyinfitz1]

so i made snapshots "visible" through SMB and it looks like there is over a TB of snapshot data. Can I just delete those or will it impact my data in any way? I didnt see an easy way in the GUI to delete all snapshots

 

[Heracles]

Hi again Flyinfitz,

Should you delete your snapshots, you will just not have them anymore after that. But know that deleting a snapshot may not free you much space at the end. Should the content of Snapshot-A be referred to by Snapshot-B, to delete Snapshot-A will not free you space because that space will then be assigned to Snapshot-B. The same way, if B is referred to by C, to delete B will not free it and will just "switch" the content to C.

By deleting a snapshot, you free only whatever was unique to that snapshot and not related to any other one or to live data.