topic Re: is there a way to create a sophisticated snapshot policy beyond hourly/daily/weekly ? in ONTAP Discussions

is there a way to create a sophisticated snapshot policy beyond hourly/daily/weekly ?

PMSBoeblingen — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 14:05:09 GMT

I have a volume which stores daily rsync images via NFS from legacy HPUX production systems for recovery purposes

The default policy is not suitable as it stores hourly snapshots which are of no use at all.

There are 2 daily snapshots which is counter productive as our production doesn't work on weekends.

Thus after a weekend I loose the snapshot from thursday in favor of two useless equal snapshots from saturday and sunday.

The situation is even worse if there is an extended weekend with public holidays.

That said I would like to be able to specify 5 daily snapshots but only on workdays so that I always have 5 days of productive work.

Is there a solution to this?

Re: is there a way to create a sophisticated snapshot policy beyond hourly/daily/weekly ?

AlexDawson — Thu, 01 Feb 2018 07:57:34 GMT

Hi there,

This can absolutely be setup, either via command line, or via the OnCommand System Manager GUI. Using the GUI is by far the easiest way to setup schedules like this. Please see the attached screenshot from the newly released ONTAP 9.3 showing an example. Once the schedule is created, apply it to the snapshot policy and it will only create snapshots at the day and time specified.

Hope this helps!

Re: is there a way to create a sophisticated snapshot policy beyond hourly/daily/weekly ?

Rick_Taylor — Mon, 09 Jul 2018 20:29:06 GMT

What would the commandline look like?

Re: is there a way to create a sophisticated snapshot policy beyond hourly/daily/weekly ?

AlexDawson — Tue, 10 Jul 2018 04:32:21 GMT

Hi there,

This functionality is covered by this documentation - http://docs.netapp.com/ontap-9/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.netapp.doc.pow-dap%2FGUID-01A36588-F4BC-4048-BBB9-EE9990471415.html&cp=6_4_3_2_1 - with more detailed documentation at http://docs.netapp.com/ontap-9/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.netapp.doc.dot-cm-cmpr-930%2FTOC__job__schedule.html&cp=4_2_12_13

The GUI is by far easier - but the CLI remains available