Can you delete contents of .zfs/snapshot folder without affecting data?

[Gimpymoo]

I know this sounds stupid but when I check the size of some of these folders, they are HUGE, terrabytes.

When I setup the snapshots initially, I got carried away with the Windows rollback feature so created too many snapshots, have thousands over a 2 week schedule. Every 5 minutes, LOL.

I assume deleting these does not affect the data in the dataset?

Deleting snapshots with the webui seems a very slow process when you have that many, deleting them from the Windows folders would be much easier.

Thanks.

 

[sretalla]

I assume deleting these does not affect the data in the dataset?

Deleting snapshots with the webui seems a very slow process when you have that many, deleting them from the Windows folders would be much easier.

Destroying a snapshot doesn't destroy the "current" version of the pool data.

You're probably going to want to learn the zfs destroy command to get rid of your snapshots, deleting the .zfs directories isn't a good idea (even if it does work, which I think it doesn't).

zfs destroy pool/dataset/path@snapshot1Name%snapshot2Name

Where snapshot1Name and snapshot2Name are the names of the snapshots which you would like all the snapshots in between in the sense of time, not alphabetically, (including the named ones) will be destroyed