How do I delete snapshots from my /home folder?

[ColonelPanic232]

Hi everybody. I'm running Gecko 15.4 Leap in btrfs at the moment with snapshots enabled, and it's getting to the point where the number of snapshots I have is starting to fill up the partition so it's a good idea to get rid of some. The snapshot folder is in the form;

/home/.snapshots/number/snapshot/username/subdirectories (subdirectories being things like Downloads, Documents, Pictures etc.

I'd like to get rid of some of these snapshots in order to reclaim the space on my hard drive. If I use snapper to do it, which I assume is the way that is recommended for this task, what name do I have to give for the subvolume?

Thanks in advance,

CP .

(P.S. I now think that I'd have been better off formatting the partition with ext4 instead, and I may do that and start again with an empty partition if I can't clear out the snapshots any other way.)

[geckolinux]

This should work:

• https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Snapper_Tutorial#Cleanup_Algorithms
• https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/leap/reference/html/book-reference/cha-snapper.html#sec-snapper-clean-up

The -c config name is home in the case that you mention (you don't need to specify the subvolume).

Also you can just run sudo systemctl start snapper-cleanup.service to make it automatically delete old snapshots according to the retention rules, and make sure that snapper-cleanup.timer is active for it to do so automatically.
https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Snapper_Tutorial#Automatic_Snapshots_Cleanup_Mechanisms

[ColonelPanic232]

Thanks for your reply Geckolinux. Unfortunately I wasn't able to obtain a listing of the snapshots on my system in the way you describe, and had to resort to deleting them manually instead. For example;

/home/.snapshots/71 # btrfs property set -ts /home/.snapshots/71/snapshot ro false
/home/.snapshots/71 # rm -rf /home/.snapshots/71/snapshot

It may not be the ideal way of doing it, but I did manage to free up between 17 and 18 GB of space on my partition that way.

I'm keeping btrfs for the time being but I feel that for me, ext4 works better as a file system than btrfs does although I accept that may not be true for everybody.

Thanks for your help anyway,

CP .

[ColonelPanic232]

I'm still getting unwanted snapshots created automatically in my /home partition, and a lot of them too. How do I turn them off please? I've seen instructions online for doing this but they're written for Ubuntu users.

Thanks in advance,

CP .