I have searched the archives and I can't find a solution to my problem.
The issue is that I often want to remove just one file, or maybe a few files, from a snapshot in order to save space.
Very often a user will create several extremely large (many 10s of gigabytes) intermediate files in a filesystem that's
maybe 200GB and accidentally leave them overnight. When he deletes the file it moves into the snapshot, which we don't
really want. It's a useless file now. We have played a lot of games like creating some volumes that have snapshots turned on
and some volumes that don't in order to work around this limitation, but I'd really like to use some equivalent of clri to just
blow away a file and all references to that file when a user makes a mistake and leaves a large temporary file lying around.
Add those blocks back to the free list immediately. I don't want to delete the entire snapshot, because there are many
thousands of (small) files I want to keep there. I just want to remove specially selected files as the superuser. This limitation is
really killing us and is possibly my biggest complaint with ONTAP. I know snapshots are read-only blah blah blah. This
could be done if Netapp wanted to do it and it could be done easily.
I know this was not possible many versions of ONTAP ago, but is this possible now? I would like this added as a feature if not.
Any suggestions on how to solve this problem would be appreciated.
Dimitri
