PowerScale OneFS 9.2.1.0 CLI Administration Guide

Snapshot disk-space usage

The amount of disk space that a snapshot consumes depends on both the amount of data stored by the snapshot and the amount of data the snapshot references from other snapshots.

Immediately after OneFS creates a snapshot, the snapshot consumes a negligible amount of disk space. The snapshot does not consume additional disk space unless the data referenced by the snapshot is modified. If the data that a snapshot references is modified, the snapshot stores read-only copies of the original data. A snapshot consumes only the space that is necessary to restore the contents a directory to the state it was in when the snapshot was taken.

To reduce disk-space usage, snapshots that reference the same directory reference each other, with older snapshots referencing newer snapshots. If a file is deleted, and several snapshots reference the file, a single snapshot stores a copy the file, and the other snapshots reference the file from the snapshot that stored the copy. The reported size of a snapshot reflects only the amount of data stored by the snapshot and does not include the amount of data referenced by the snapshot.

Because snapshots do not consume a set amount of storage space, there is no available-space requirement for creating a snapshot. The size of a snapshot grows according to how the data referenced by the snapshot is modified. A cluster cannot contain more than 20,000 snapshots.