After breaking SM CIFS 32-bit Volume contained inside 64 bit-aggr , what happens to all 32-bit snaps

[Ontapforrum]

Hi All,

I have a CIFS volume of size 4TB of which 800 GB is 32-bit snapshots, the volume is part of the older 32-bit aggr Mirrored to 64-bit aggregate.

My questions : When the SnapMirror is broken, what happens to all the 32-bit snaps ?  

Do they remain as is once the Mirror is broken-off, and becomes useless ? Any idea ?

Even if I do in-place upgrade to 64 bit on the source, 32-bit are locked inodes so they cannot be anyway  expanded so they are useless. Is it a good idea to copy those snaps to anthoner 32-bit aggregate, just in case we need to retreive a file from previous snapshot ? 

Thanks!

[Ontapforrum · Accepted solution]

As migration completed successfully, I have the answer to my question.

Once SM is broken-off, the 'volume status -v' command correctly shows 64-bit now,  instead of 32-bit as seen before the Mirror was broken-off. All the 32-bit snaps remains as is, they will be cycled-off/deleted before the data is moved to cDOT.  

Internally, WAFL is runing a background task to upgrade the indirect blocks to 64-bit which can be seen via - wafl scan status command from - advanced mode.

Are blocks in Snapshot copies also converted to the 64-bit format?
Answer: No. Snapshot copies are read-only and are not updated by the expansion process. The expansion process updates only the indirect blocks in the active file system.