SOLVED Missing 2TB?

[TheDubiousDubber]

I've noticed my media share filling up as of late. I still have plenty of room left, but decided to delete some old stuff to free up space. Despite deleting a number of things it seems my share is not growing in free space. I did some digging and it turns out that my media share (using CIFS, and according to Windows) takes up about 5.8TB. That seems about right since I have hundreds of movies taking up a lot of the storage. The odd part is, is that according to the FreeNAS GUI, under Storage > Volumes, the Used column says it has taken up 7.6TB. I can understand if there is a little disparity, but a little under 2TB difference? Seems like something is off. It's almost as if deleting things from the share deletes them from showing up in Windows, etc., but it isn't freeing up any space. Storage > Volumes also shows a free space of 6.4 TB which matches what Windows shows. With my setup, I should have roughly 14+TB of storage space which matches up with what the FreeNAS GUI says in terms of used/free space. It's like I have a ton of hidden files somewhere.

 

[pirateghost]

Do you have snapshots enabled?

 

[TheDubiousDubber]

I actually just started looking into that before you posted. I do have snapshots enabled. I'm guessing that is what is taking up so much space. Haven't had to restore since I enable it. Maybe I'll try reducing the frequency or not store them as long.

Seems like a lot of wasted space.

 

[pirateghost]

Be selective in what you snapshot. Snapshotting data that gets moved and deleted frequently (like a media download directory) will fill the storage with unnecessary snapshots.

 

[TheDubiousDubber]

Yeah. I was just snapshotting the entire share for simplicity of the setup. Clearly that is a very inefficient way of doing it. So might be well worth my time to snapshot subfolders instead. Thanks for the help.

 

[pirateghost]

Yeah. I was just snapshotting the entire pool/volume for simplicity of the setup. Clearly that is a very inefficient way of doing it. So might be well worth my time to snapshot datasets instead. Thanks for the help.

Fixed that for you

 

[TheDubiousDubber]

Sort of. I have a dataset named media on my pool. I was backing up the entire media dataset. Clearly I should have broken my media dataset into several datasets so my snapshots would include my movie folders without having to include the downloads folder which is constantly changing. I'm still a bit of a newb when it comes to this stuff. So clearly I could have set things up better, at least for my purposes.

 

[rs225]

I think you should consider it 2TB of Oops Insurance.

Someone else a few weeks ago lost virtually everything to ransomware because they accidentally didn't snapshot everything.

 

[TheDubiousDubber]

I'll have to reconfigure my datasets at some point. At the moment it is not a big deal. But I do take my backups seriously. I have another FreeNAS server specifically setup for replication. I sincerely doubt I'll ever have to deal with ransomware, but I'm covered if I ever do.