This is pretty unusual. I’ve used NetApps totaling over 10 years and never saw this. Then again, I’m not seeing 36% dedupe either. ☺
Robert – I’d be interested in talking to you offline about your NetApp maintenance agreement, if you don’t mind. Paul From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Robert Cato Sent: Tuesday, October 18, 2016 10:20 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [NTSysADM] Mysteriously Disappearing Home Drive Data Used NetApp for over 7 years across two jobs. Never seen this behavior. I do know for sure that snapshots are read only. They can't be deleted/modified. Just a suggestion, retain snapshots longer if you have the space. We keep 96 hourly, 60 daily, and 26 weekly. Our snapshot footprint is about 14% of volume, but dedupe and compression savings is 36%. On Tue, Oct 18, 2016 at 10:47 AM, Charles F Sullivan <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: I have two different questions revolving around this. - Is anyone using NetApp CIFS and seeing entire folders worth of data disappear mysteriously, including all snapshots? - Whether using NetApp or not, has anyone seen users’ home folders disappear, or at least the contents of them? We have had several of these over the past year or so. I currently have a case where the user received a new computer on 10/13 and the home drive data, which lives on NetApp CIFS, was missing at that point. That’s not too surprising, but when I went to recover from a snapshot, the snapshots were also empty going all the way back to the oldest one on 9/17. The user swears he had accessed the data after 9/17 from his old computer. To me the most likely scenario is that the user had Offline Files enabled (not a standard here) and was only using the cached version of the data. But that would mean that somehow the cached files became orphaned (for some reason) before the data was deleted from the NAS. This seems kind of unlikely, but who knows? I can’t imagine that the CIFS server decided to delete the user’s data and all of the snapshots right at the same time he got the new machine. That’s even more unlikely it would seem. If anyone has any other theories or similar experience, I would be grateful to hear about it.
