On 04/17/10 12:56 PM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
From: Erik Trimble [mailto:erik.trim...@oracle.com]
Sent: Friday, April 16, 2010 7:35 PM
Doesn't that defeat the purpose of a snapshot?
Eric hits
the
nail right on the head: you *don't* want to support such a "feature",
as it breaks the fundamental assumption about what a snapshot is (and
represents).
Ok, point taken, but what you've stated is just an opinion. It's not a
fundamental necessity, or a mathematical necessity, or impossible to think
otherwise, that a snapshot is 100% and always will be immutable.
But is a fundamental of zfs:
snapshot
A read-only version of a file system or volume at a
given point in time. It is specified as filesys...@name
or vol...@name.
IMHO, for some people in some situations the assumption that a snapshot is
identical to the way the FS was at some given time can be valuable.
However:
If your only option is to destroy the whole snapshot, in order to free up
disk space occupied by some files in the snapshot ... Destroying the whole
snapshot for some people in some situations can be even less desirable than
destroying the subset of files you want freed from disk. There could be
value in the ability to destroy some subset of files without destroying the
whole snapshot.
I can see your point, it can be really annoying when there's a very
large file you want to delete to free space locked up in snapshots.
I've been there and it was a pain. Now I use nested filesystems for
storing media files, so removing snapshots is more manageable.
--
Ian.
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