The FreeBSD Diary

When I built the Kraken ZFS file server, I used a snapshot to copy the data over. Those snapshots are still hanging around. I'd like to get rid of them. I can do that with zfs promote. This article documents how I did that.

I have a few snaphots here?

$ zfs list -t snapshot
NAME                         USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
storage/Retored@2010.07.27   706G      -  3.11T  -
storage/Retored@2010.07.28   264K      -  2.42T  -

Those snapshots were used with zfs send and zfs receive to copy the files from the original ZFS system to the new one. Now that array is solid and stable, the snapshots are still around but now longer needed. My goal is to get rid of them.

On a side note, I am annoyed by this inconsistency in free space:

$ zpool list
NAME      SIZE   USED  AVAIL    CAP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
storage  12.7T  7.28T  5.41T    57%  ONLINE  -

$ df -h | grep stora
storage                       3.7T    1.7G    3.7T     0%    /storage
storage/Retored               3.7T     39K    3.7T     0%    /storage/Retored
storage/bacula                8.0T    4.3T    3.7T    54%    /storage/bacula
storage/pgsql                 3.7T    5.5G    3.7T     0%    /storage/pgsql

Which is correct?

But back to the promotion. From man zfs:

zfs promote clone-filesystem

    Promotes a clone file system to no longer be dependent on its "ori-
    gin" snapshot. This makes it possible to destroy  the  file  system
    that  the clone was created from. The clone parent-child dependency
    relationship is reversed, so that the origin file system becomes  a
    clone of the specified file system.

    The  snapshot  that  was cloned, and any snapshots previous to this
    snapshot, are now owned by the promoted clone. The space  they  use
    moves  from the origin file system to the promoted clone, so enough
    space must be available to  accommodate  these  snapshots.  No  new
    space  is  consumed  by this operation, but the space accounting is
    adjusted. The promoted clone must not have any conflicting snapshot
    names  of  its own. The rename subcommand can be used to rename any
    conflicting snapshots.

If I try to remove this snapshot, I get told that it forms the basis for another filesystem:

$ zfs destroy storage/Retored@2010.07.28
cannot destroy 'storage/Retored@2010.07.28': snapshot has dependent clones
use '-R' to destroy the following datasets:
storage/bacula

Thus, what I want to try is promoting storage/bacula.

$ sudo zfs promote storage/bacula
Password:
$

That took about 10 seconds. Now look at my snapshots:

$ zfs list -t snapshot
NAME                        USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
storage/bacula@2010.07.27   706G      -  3.11T  -
storage/bacula@2010.07.28   218K      -  2.42T  -

As you can see, the snapshots are now storage/bacula@ whereas they were storage/Retored@. Now let's delete a snapshot:

$ sudo zfs destroy storage/bacula@2010.07.27
Password:

That took about a minute. Now let's check our space:

$ zpool list
NAME      SIZE   USED  AVAIL    CAP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
storage  12.7T  6.31T  6.38T    49%  ONLINE  -

OK, now delete the next snapshot:

$ sudo zfs destroy storage/bacula@2010.07.28
cannot destroy 'storage/bacula@2010.07.28': snapshot has dependent clones
use '-R' to destroy the following datasets:
storage/Retored

That dataset does not contain any data:

$ ls -l /storage/Retored
total 0

So I think I'm safe in just destroying that dataset and then removing that snapshot. But I haven't tried that yet.