Zpool not releasing all available deleted space

[gearhead]

There is a lot of discussion on this forum & questions about zpool not reporting/releasing all the space from deleted files. I experienced this first hand. I have a 4TB pool for media files. It got filled up to 95%. I created another pool (8TB) moved some of the files (200GB) to the new pool. Zpool reported about 24GB of additional space. I tried this several time with moving additional files. Each time zpool reported a fraction of the deleted files storage. I move all the file to the new pool and deleted and recreated the old pool. I copied all the files back to it, zpool reported approximately 800GB more available storage space than prior to reformatting. I verified that all files were copied. This is just an observation.

 

[anodos]

There is a lot of discussion on this forum & questions about zpool not reporting/releasing all the space from deleted files. I experienced this first hand. I have a 4TB pool for media files. It got filled up to 95%. I created another pool (8TB) moved some of the files (200GB) to the new pool. Zpool reported about 24GB of additional space. I tried this several time with moving additional files. Each time zpool reported a fraction of the deleted files storage. I move all the file to the new pool and deleted and recreated the old pool. I copied all the files back to it, zpool reported approximately 800GB more available storage space than prior to reformatting. I verified that all files were copied. This is just an observation.

You can check used stats for the dataset you're using for storing media by running the command zfs get -o space <dataset name>. This will give a breakdown of how space is being used (snapshots, reservations, etc, etc). You may have snapshots eating up space.

 

[gearhead]

You can check used stats for the dataset you're using for storing media by running the command zfs get -o space <dataset name>. This will give a breakdown of how space is being used (snapshots, reservations, etc, etc). You may have snapshots eating up space.

Sorry I forgot to mention in my original post that there were no snapshots in that pool.

 

[anodos]

Sorry I forgot to mention in my original post that there were no snapshots in that pool.

The you can check the `freeing` counter in zpool stats. Sometimes freeing a large amount of space can take a little time. zpool get freeing <pool>

 

[gearhead]

Thank you. Next time.

 

[anodos]

Thank you. Next time.

No problem. There is ongoing work to make dataset / pool counters more clear for end-users in the webui.

 

[gearhead]

@anodos my pool name bkup when I try zpool get freeing bkup I get an error message cannot open 'bkup: no such pool'.

 

[anodos]

@anodos my pool name bkup when I try zpool get freeing bkup I get an error message cannot open 'bkup: no such pool'.

Double-check you don't have typo in your pool name. zpool list should give you list of currently imported pools.