Downsizing a volume

[inthiam12]

Can I lower the size of a volume without affecting the qtrees that reside in it? I would just create another volume of the proper size but I wouldn't be able to do a vol copy.

[adamfox]

Sure.  You can always lower the size of a flex volume down to the size of the actual data in the volume on the fly, no disruption.  That's the beauty of FlexVols.

[inthiam12]

Thanks Adam. I see that I can increase a snapdrive with the resize command. How about decreasing the SnapDrive size? I need to resize a snap drive on  a volume.

[misra]

Using SnapDrive you can not downsize a volume.

[inthiam12]

Thanks...so if I need to take the data off a SnapDrive, create a new snap drive of the appropriate (smaller size), and place the data back on the smaller drive what would you recommend? I may have to just backup the data and restore to the smaller drive using a third party app?

[misra]

Yes.

[ctina]

You can downsize a disk created through snapdrive on a windows 2008 system. You have this option available from SDW 6.1 onwards.

Just select the resize option from SDW for any disk and you can see the maximum and minimum sizes allowed to resize the disk.

If you select any size smaller than the original size, the disk gets shrinked (downsized).

However the above holds good only for windows 2008.

If you want to achieve the same on windows 2003, you cannot do it through SDW. You might have to create a disk of smaller size and copy the original data back to it.

[inthiam12]

Thanks ctina,

Unfortunately we are using SDW 5.0. You can only decrease the Snap in v. 6.0 or greater.