Snapper filling /

English Install/Boot/Login
#1

Hi folks,

I run a oS 13.2 installation, and I think I went with the defaults, at least I have a 40 GiB /root partition (+snapper) and a seperate XFS /home partition…
Here’s my issue: Occasionally (~every 2 months) snapper eats up all space left on /root. I really like snapper (it has helped me twice already, I don’t want to miss it!), and up to now I was always able to just “snapper rm …]”, but as you can imagine, this behaviour is extremely annoying. So here are two questions:

(1) The snapper doc has parameters such as NUMBER_CLEANUP, NUMBER_LIMIT and the like. As I have no experience in that field, how can I find a good measure here (since the default at least in my case seems to be odd)? Is it save to “play around” with these parameters? What should I do/try/avoid? It’s not that my machine is super-mission-critical, but I’d prefer not to break it.

(2) I am pretty sure my set-up is the openSUSE (13.2) default. And the behaviour – I assume – is related to me doing nothing but occasional “zypper up”'s. Did I do s.th. wrong? Or is the default designed to break the system?! In the latter case, why?

Any help – or hints for further reading – are welcomed!
Cheers,

PBiel

#2

Hi
It may need balancing as well… You can set the timeline (newer releases turn it off) and set the number value (I use 4 and important at 2).

The configuration file for snapper is /etc/snapper/configs/root which you would need to edit it’s self explanatory once you open it for editing.

Can you show the output from;


snapper list | wc -l
btrfs filesystem usage /

Then modify the snapper config and then run;


/etc/cron.daily/suse.de-snapper
snapper list | wc -l

Did the above count reduce the snapper totals?

Post back the details, if not completely cleaned up, can run through the balance command.

#3

Ah, I see… I’ll play around with it. Thanks so far.

As of now, I manually deleted almost all snapshots (to free some disk space). I’ll come back in some weeks to report if anything was unexpected.

Still: Why doesn’t openSUSE come with these more stable and helpful defaults?! I still get the impression that a user that just goes on with accepting everything as default will sooner or later have a stale system. That’s not good, is it?

#4

Hi
Then you may want to balance the btrfs system?

Yes, they were still a little aggressive for 13.2 IMHO, but I guess some folks wanted that, once configured to your requirements you should be fine.