topic deleting qtrees from a clone before split clone process completes in ONTAP Discussions

deleting qtrees from a clone before split clone process completes

BelaAtCU — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 10:01:43 GMT

Hi All,

I was wondering if you may know what happens when:

A large 100TB FlexVol has been cloned. The clone has been split. The cloning process is actively running.

In this state I would like to delete some Qtrees that will *not* be needed in the split cloned volume.

Because of the large data clone I hope to speed up the otherwise slow process so unwanted Qtrees would not be cloned at all. (I do need all qtrees on the clone parent)

The question is that while the split is still running if a qtree is deleted would it still be moved from the parent?

My logic would say it should be smart enough to not move it but I don't know how the actual clone split code is implemented.

Thank you!

Bela

Re: deleting qtrees from a clone before split clone process completes

pedro_rocha — Tue, 26 Apr 2022 21:42:23 GMT

Hi, just to make sure a understand the process:

you have a parent volume (vol1)

you clone it (vol2)

you split them

you delete some qtrees from vol1 while the split clone process is in place

you want to know if vol2 (clone) will inherit or not the deleted qtrees.

Is that it?

Re: deleting qtrees from a clone before split clone process completes

BelaAtCU — Wed, 27 Apr 2022 14:12:30 GMT

Hello Pedro,

Not exactly. The procedure is:

Parent FlexVol Vol1

Clone Vol1 to Vol2

Remove All Qtrees from Vol2 I do not want to have on clone.

Split the clone.

I am actually running it now. It is working. Vol1 is about 90 TB.

I deleted about 50TB worth of qtrees. Then I split the clone. It is only copying the 40 TB as I was hoping it would.

The reason I was trying to do this is that the clone split itself is painfully slow. I found that in many cases not just this, it is hardly usable. Contrary using snapmirror or snapmirror restore is blazing fast so I am using those.

I was thinking that the slowness us because the clone being limited to the same aggregate whereas snapmirror is not.

Thanks Pedro for your insight.

kind regards,

Bela

Re: deleting qtrees from a clone before split clone process completes

Mjizzini — Wed, 04 May 2022 04:08:20 GMT

Vol2 will operate as a separate volume than vol1. Therefore anything you delete on vol2 will not effect vol1.

The split will keep vol2 data but it will make it indecent from the original volume vol1 snapshot.