Not taking empty snapshots

[Patrick_3000]

I've been fine-tuning my snapshot settings, and I noticed that for some of my periodic snapshot tasks, I had "allow taking empty snapshots" checked, and for others, it was unchecked. I am tentatively unchecking this for all periodic snapshot tasks and wanted to see what the community thinks of this and what the best practice is.

The reason I'm unchecking it is to allow for easier snapshot management. I tend to accumulate a large number of snapshots, and on the very rare occasion that I need to access one, I end up wading through pages of them to find the one I'm looking for. It seems to me that unchecking "allow taking empty snapshots" will greatly reduce the number of stored snapshots and make snapshot management easier.

Moreover, unless I'm missing something, I don't see the point in taking empty snapshots. Why, for example, take a snapshot at 1 am, then another (empty) one at 2 am, 3 am, 4 am, etc., when nobody is likely accessing the dataset during those hours? If I ever need to clone and mount a snapshot to get access to an earlier version of the dataset, I can use the 1 am snapshot if the dataset didn't change after 1 am.

Does this make sense?

 

[Ericloewe]

There is an edge case, whereby the data is unchanged for longer than the retention period, breaking the sending of incremental snapshots.

 

[Patrick_3000]

There is an edge case, whereby the data is unchanged for longer than the retention period, breaking the sending of incremental snapshots.

I see. That makes sense.