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

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