topic Re: Copy CIFS snapshots to a non-netapp system in ONTAP Discussions

Copy CIFS snapshots to a non-netapp system

BJORNJOHANSSON — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 12:26:57 GMT

Hi all,

We have an old FAS3140 that we need to decommission, it's out of support. It contains about 10TB Snapvault snapshots from a CIFS volume that will expire in a year. We want to move these snapshot to another storage, but do not have access to NetApp storage, only other NAS with SMB/NFS. Is that possible somehow?

Since it's possible to browse the snapshots via CIFS, I could just copy all snapshot folders to a NAS, but that would surely break the snapshots since it will not anylonger be stored on WAFL. Right?

Please advise.

Thank you!

Is it possible to copy

Re: Copy CIFS snapshots to a non-netapp system

GidonMarcus — Tue, 25 Jun 2019 09:48:20 GMT

if you have a very good dedup engine on the new platform you can copy the \vol\vol_name\.snapshot folder over cifs (need to enable the folder to be visible). however if you don't have dedup. each file will be copy and consume the space as the number of snapshots you have.

a more netapp way of solution i can offer is to purchase a year license of an ONTAP select VMWare appliance, provision it on your new environment and snapmirror the volumes to it.

Gidi

Re: Copy CIFS snapshots to a non-netapp system

BJORNJOHANSSON — Tue, 25 Jun 2019 11:36:15 GMT

Hi and thank you so much for your answer.

Yeah, we are using Windows Server 2016 with ReFs which do not support dedup. Boss said, just unplug it and store it. Restore times will be longer...

Fine by me. 🙂