Delete all Snapshots

[Catsrules]

I have gone a little overboard on my Snapshots (24000+) I was young and naive this being my first FreeNAS box and didn't know any better. Now I am seeing that managment and performance is starting to take a hit. I am trying to mend my ways and come back to a much more manageable snapshot system. I have fixed my Periodic Snapshot tasks so I am snapshot less and keeping them shorter amount of time.

Now to my question is there a fast way to remove every snapshot on the system and just start over?

 

[dlavigne]

There's no fast way as ZFS needs to determine if any existing snapshots depend upon the snapshots being deleted. If you have that many, it's gonna take a (long) while... Best to start the process when the system isn't under heavy use.

 

[alterbridge86]

I was in the same boat as you actually, my snapshots had gotten all messed up due to some failed replications and long story short I ended up with way too many on disk. In my scenario, I stopped all automated snapshot tasks and removed all replication tasks as well, as I was intending on reseeding the replication from scratch anyway.

I used a script with a simple for loop to enumerate the snapshots and delete them, one by one. This greatly reduces the amount of work I had to do though as I didn't have to go through each one individually. Hope this helps.

Code:

#!/bin/bash
for snapshot in `zfs list -H -t snapshot | cut -f 1`
do
zfs destroy $snapshot
done

 

[bollar]

This was helpful. I'd change the second line as follows, so the system snapshots aren't deleted (replace tank with your pool name):

Code:

for snapshot in `zfs list -H -t snapshot -r tank | cut -f 1`