One of the mistakes I made recently was not understanding my daily snapshots, retention and expiration well enough when I created protection domain to keep local snapshots.



First, I took a shortcut to creating daily snapshots by selecting Repeat Weekly with every day selected. The docs are a bit light on details so I assumed this would be treated like a daily snapshot. This can casue a problem with many snapshots to keep. I selected 7 so I would have a running weeks worth. Actually, it keeps 7 weeks worth of weekly/daily snapshots.



When my free space decrease to a warning state then critical state, I started looking at VM usage but found it increased only a couple TB which meant I was missing about 40TB! While it wasn't clear the snapshots were consuming massive storage, it was clear it was not what I planned. So, I deleted a bunch of snapshots after changing to daily snapshots and keeping the last 14.



This helped free a lot of space but there was still some space missing. The color palate of Prism is pretty hard to see some elements and I realized I should check the Include Expired box. I cleaned up the expired and finally had the set of snapshots I desired. I was eventually rewarded with all my missing free space.



One thing to keep in mind is the Curator mapreduce process that scrubs deleted data is run on a schedule and can take many hours to free delete blocks. It took a few days for all my freed space to be reported as free again.



Cheers!

Joe