Shadow Copies not working

[Scampicfx]

Hey guys,

I know this question was asked in the past a couple of times. Nevertheless, although reading all the other discussions, the shadow copies feature isn't working at my TrueNAS core system. I remember it was working loong ago in the past, but after an upgrade a few years ago, it stopped working. However, I need to get this fixed now.

- All my shares have the preset enabled "Default share paremeters", which means the shadow copies checkbox is checked
- All my shares are on dataset level
- I have configured a couple of period snapshot tasks with this naming schema: auto-%Y%m%d.%H%M-2w or auto-%Y%m%d.%H%M-2m or auto-%Y%m%d.%H%M-2y
- When looking at system -> Snapshots, I see nearly 10000 snapshots.

However, at my windows 11 computer, the shadow copies won't show up. I have the feeling that my computer isn't really looking up if there are any snapshots available (there is no progress circle spinning for example). It simply tells there are no snapshots. It feels like my computer doesn't even try to lookup if there are any snapshots.

What's the best way to investigate this problem? Do you have any recommendations?

 

[winnielinnie]

It simply tells there are no snapshots. It feels like my computer doesn't even try to lookup if there are any snapshots.

Where in Windows 11 are you referring to this? The File History context-menu of Explorer?

 

[Scampicfx]

Hey,
thanks for your reply! I do a right-click on a file => Properties => "Previous Versions" . However, no previous versions get listed there.

As an example, the command

Code:

zfs list -t snap -o name,used | grep zsys-depot

gives a following result:

Code:

root@storageunit:~ # zfs list -t snap -o name,used | grep zsys-depot
storage/zsys-depot@auto-2023-12-08_02-00-1m8.63G
storage/zsys-depot@auto-2023-12-09_02-00-1m1.71G
storage/zsys-depot@auto-2023-12-10_02-00-1m3.61G
storage/zsys-depot@auto-2023-12-11_02-00-1m4.69G
storage/zsys-depot@auto-2023-12-12_02-00-1m3.88G
storage/zsys-depot@auto-2023-12-13_02-00-1m4.19G
storage/zsys-depot@auto-2023-12-14_02-00-1m8.06G
storage/zsys-depot@auto-2023-12-15_02-00-1m6.18G
storage/zsys-depot@auto-2023-12-16_02-00-1m5.08G
storage/zsys-depot@auto-2023-12-17_02-00-1m6.49G
storage/zsys-depot@auto-2023-12-18_02-00-1m5.97G
storage/zsys-depot@auto-2023-12-19_02-00-1m13.0G
storage/zsys-depot@auto-2023-12-20_02-00-1m5.64G
storage/zsys-depot@auto-2023-12-21_02-00-1m1.67G
storage/zsys-depot@auto-2023-12-22_02-00-1m2.00G
storage/zsys-depot@auto-2023-12-23_02-00-1m2.57G
storage/zsys-depot@auto-2023-12-24_02-00-1m3.72G
storage/zsys-depot@auto-2023-12-25_02-00-1m2.92G
storage/zsys-depot@auto-2023-12-26_02-00-1m2.26M
storage/zsys-depot@auto-2023-12-27_02-00-1m3.65M
storage/zsys-depot@auto-2023-12-28_02-00-1m 358M
storage/zsys-depot@auto-2023-12-29_02-00-1m1.21G
storage/zsys-depot@auto-2023-12-30_02-00-1m1.09G
storage/zsys-depot@auto-2023-12-31_02-00-1m1.85G
storage/zsys-depot@auto-2024-01-01_02-00-1m2.76G
storage/zsys-depot@auto-2024-01-02_02-00-1m2.22G
storage/zsys-depot@auto-2024-01-03_02-00-1m4.11G
storage/zsys-depot@auto-2024-01-04_02-00-1m3.38G
storage/zsys-depot@auto-2024-01-05_02-00-1m2.80G
storage/zsys-depot@auto-2024-01-06_02-00-1m1.97M

So from my perspective, the snapshots are getting created correctly?

 

[nKk]

You can access ZFS snapshots from Windows file explorer using this URL:

Code:

\\<server>\<share>\.zfs\snapshot

You must use only share name without including internal folders and the share should be a dataset. From here you can access all snapshots of this dataset and can copy files/folders.

I can't help you to fix "Previous version" dialog in Windows.

 

[Scampicfx]

I started to reconfigure all shares and all periodic snapshot tasks => now it's working also in windows dialog!

 

[anodos]

`written` is what you need to look at. If dataset has more than around 500 snapshots available, then _none_ will be visible in Windows (UI limitation). We have warnings about this in our documentation. If auxiliary parameters have been set, they may also impact shadow copies.