Need to delete some stuff... skeered to do it wrong.

[SoonerLater]

I find all this so intimidating that it's a wonder I've come this far. Anyway, I've created shares by mistake that I don't need, but I'm afraid to delete them without destroying data. Here's a peak at my volumes:

\mnt\Buffy3\Music
\mnt\Buffy3\Photos
\mnt\Buffy3\Video

And shares:

Music --> /mnt/Buffy3/Music
Photos --> /mnt/Buffy3 <<< this is wrong
Photos --> /mnt/Buffy3/Photos
Photos2 --> /mnt/Buffy3 <<< this is wrong
Photos3 --> /mnt/Buffy3/Photos3 <<< this is wrong
Video --> /mnt/Buffy3/Video

I would like to get rid of the three wrong shares, but I'm scare that deleting the will delete data too. I don't want to delete any data. How should I proceed?

 

[pirateghost]

In the cifs share page you can safely delete those shares. It won't delete the data. If you were to delete from the zfs volume page you would lose data

Sent from my Nexus 5

 

[SoonerLater]

Thanks for your help.

This prompted me to do some more reading on volumes vs. datasets vs. shares... and now I see that I (probably) made another mistake. I guess that I should have ONE volume (/mnt/Buffy3), three DATASETS (music, photos, video) and three SHARES instead of what I have. Your thoughts on whether this is worth changing at this point?

 

[pirateghost]

That is all dependent on how you like to manage it all. It doesn't really matter from a technical standpoint, just a management one.

Sent from my Nexus 5

 

[SoonerLater]

PirateGhost, I see that you're replying by phone, so even on an über cool Nexus 5, it's still a pain to type more than a sentence or two. With that in mind, is there a short answer to what the advantages / disadvantages are for:

(1) three volumes + three shares
versus
(2) one volume + three datasets + three shares.

If you can't answer that briefly, I don't want to impose on you to write a white paper on your phone.

 

[pirateghost]

Lol. I don't really know of any advantages of one or the other. Hopefully someone can come in and give their 2c because I don't think it matters at all personally.

Sent from my Nexus 5

 

[cyberjock]

It depends on how you might want to do zfs snapshots/replication and personal preference. I'm an advocate of single volume storage myself. But some others like to do datasets. There is no right or wrong answer. It just depends on how YOU want to admininstrate your server.

 

[Dusan]

There are two main reasons for using datasets.
Reason one was already mentioned by cyberjock -- you can only snapshot an entire dataset/pool. So, if you have data that you want to snapshot with different schedules you need to use datasets.
Reason two are the ZFS attributes (compression, quota, reservation, ...) that can be set per dataset. For example, if you would like to enable compression only for some shares and maybe set a disk quota for some other shares then you also need to use datasets.