Thank you all for the very helpful advice:- 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. This seems like a good way forward but is it really and if so how do I do it? 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. 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? 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. 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? 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? In the meantime, a thorough backup is running in at least two external drives (one incremental and one fresh). Stripes. On Sun, 23 Aug 2020 at 06:55, Keith Bainbridge <keithrbaugroups@gmail.com> wrote:
On 23/8/20 10:25 am, Darren Wurf wrote:
I noticed the snapshots follow a grandparent-parent-child pattern, something is managing these snapshots for you - which would explain why you have no older ones as well as why there are many recent snapshots and few older ones.
And if that is the case, that manager may be using hard links to reduce the space being used. So deleting older snapshots may not have a big affect.
I know timeshift works that way - the grandparent-parent-child pattern and hard links.
-- Keith Bainbridge
keithrbaugroups@gmail.com or ke1thozgroups@gmx.com
-- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "mlug-au" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to mlug-au+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/mlug-au/a8673e8a-117b-e3b3-3f61-6316b46fac... .
-- Stripes Theotoky -37 .713869 145.050562