Snapshot Potshot

Snapshot is a double-edged sword.

By snapshot, I am referring to that special folder found in every share on NetApp devices. It is THE place for users, or at least the one with some technical prowess, to rummage through to find that one file they deleted, accidentally or not. User can look by hours, nights, or weeks. Sure folder names like hourly.2 and nightly.3 don't immediately tell you which hour or night you want, but it is good enough most of the time. I strongly suspect Apple's Time Capsule is a NetApp device, only that the GUI, Leopard's Time Machine, is a far superior way to go through the garbage, so to speak.

On the administrative side of snapshot, however, I have to be careful not to dump too much into snapshot. In the picture, snapshot already overflowed into production area a little bit. Earlier in the week it was even worse, as snapshot was something like 200% of what it should be. What happened was I made too good a cleanup of some home qtrees. There were many terminated users and also there were some heavy users who last month I moved to a more spacious qtree. Even though the qtrees had a lot more breathing room, the large change busted snapshot's limit and production space was actually eaten up by the overflow of snapshot. Oops. Going forward I have to be more careful with cleanup, by taking into account the allocated space for snapshot, how much of snapshot is already used up, and the change that I would introduce.