topic Re: Find out what is eating up free space in ONTAP Discussions

Find out what is eating up free space

Technik — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 05:05:54 GMT

Hallo everybody,

I know this is a typical newbie question. But I asked several people with more knowledge without a result.
We have this hardware: FAS2040, DS4243

Usage is a VMware environment as well as some SMB shares.

The problem is, that some process is eating up the free space and I do not know how to find out what is causing this.

Old Snapshots were removed but what can I do to find the real cause?

Regards,
Technik

Re: Find out what is eating up free space

hariprak — Fri, 13 Feb 2015 06:46:55 GMT

Hi,

The vol status -S command displays the space used by each of the file system components as well as other features. The vol status -S command includes offline volumes. For example, you might want to understand why the df command output shows that a large amount of space is still used even though you deleted all of your data in a volume. In this case, output for the volume space usage command might show that it is due to Snapshot copies, inodes, or other metadata that does not shrink.

Only non-zero values are displayed in the command output. However, you can use the -v parameter to display all possible feature rows regardless of whether they are enabled and using any space. A value of - indicates that there is no data available to display.

The following tables explain some of the common rows in the vol status -S command output and what you can do to try to decrease space usage by that feature:

The output for this command consists of the following main categories:

    User data
    Volume metadata
    Snapshot copy information
    Total used space

You can also refer this link which explains about how to determine and control space usage in a volume, https://library.netapp.com/ecmdocs/ECMP1196986/html/GUID-77437C70-6983-4BF7-AA01-2E5F7C709059.html

Thanks

Re: Find out what is eating up free space

paulstringfellow — Fri, 13 Feb 2015 13:30:58 GMT

if you could supply a little more info on where you think space should be and where it's going from.

always good to look at things like space reclamation - size of snapshots, busy snapshots, that kind of thing.

you can also use some of the oncommand management tools to do a bit of trend analysis etc.

Re: Find out what is eating up free space

thomas_glodde — Fri, 13 Feb 2015 15:28:48 GMT

labfiler02*> priv set diag
labfiler02*> vol status -S
vol status: Unrecognized option -S
usage:
vol status [<vol-name>] [-d | -r | -v[C] | -l | -c | -C[v] | -b | -s | -f | -m | -w | -?]
- print the status of volume <vol-name> (or all volumes)
(Only -v, -l, -b, and -? are available in a vfiler context)

labfiler02*>

???

Edit: Seems to be ONTAP 8.2+ only.