topic Re: monthly snapshots? in ONTAP Discussions

monthly snapshots?

charterit — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 07:33:03 GMT

Howdy,

Can anyone point me to how to create a scheduled monthly snapshot or am I stuck keeping 4 weekly's? What I'd like to do is schedule a monthly snap on the 1st of every month. Unless there's a way to create a scheduled snap on the last day of every month? But the first seem logically easier since every month starts with 1.

Also is it possible to create scheduled yearly snap? Or am I stuck keeping 52 weekly's?

Thanks,

Eric

Re: monthly snapshots?

rkaramchedu1 — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 12:30:10 GMT

Not a direct way of doing this using the netapp itself but using a linux/unix/windows admin host, one could setup a cron/scheduler, to take a snapshot. The same script that does the snapshot creation could also do the cleanup (snapshot rotation, if you will)

A cron example might look like:

0 0 1 * * /path/to/script &gt; /dev/null 2>&amp;1

For the yearly snapshot, something like this might work:

0 0 31 12 * /path/to/script &gt; /dev/null 2>&amp;1

HTH

Re: monthly snapshots?

charterit — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 13:58:30 GMT

Thank you rkaramchedu1! Here's another question then regarding running scripts from the admin host. Instead of running another snapshot what about running a script to rename the daily/weekly snapshot? Could that be renamed and thus saved as a monthly or yearly?

Thanks,

Eric

Re: monthly snapshots?

rkaramchedu1 — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 14:36:40 GMT

Even better! The snap rename command can be used to rename snapshots. The snap sched uses the snapshot names to perform snapshot rotations.

Note that this may not work in all cases. For example, a year end snapshot might be on a weekday and if you do not have nightly snapshots turned on, then you might want to take a special snapshot just for the year-end purposes.