Changing user home directory has started duplicating contents

TrueNAS General
1

I’m running TrueNAS Community Edition 25.04.1.

In the admin UI under Credentials > Users, I’ve edited my non-root user account to change its home directory.

The old location was also shared via SMB as a “home share”, but this wasn’t ideal as it had to be case-insensitive for Windows’ sake, and had a mix of Linux and Windows files. The new location is in a different dataset but on the same underlying disk pool.

I don’t know why, but changing the home directory seems to have automatically kicked off a job to copy all the files from the old home directory to the new, about ~450 GB. This is a problem since there isn’t enough space on the disk to fit a whole second copy of the data. It’s also keeping the disks very busy when I’d like to be doing other things with the system.

I can see a user.do_home_copy “job” in the admin UI, but I have no idea what started this job, and the UI offers no way to cancel it. It’s also been stuck on 100% for several minutes and still seems to be copying new files.

(I have some screenshots of the Jobs UI which I would post here but I don’t yet have enough permissions to do that yet.)

How do I stop this job running?
What started it in the first place?
Is this normal behaviour when changing a user’s home directory? Is there some way to disable it?

2

Okay, I “fixed” it. I SSHed into the filserver, then as root ran lsof on my old home directory and killed the process which seemed to be accessing all the files in there. Just regular kill, didn’t need to add -9.

The process I killed was called asyncio_l and I think was responsible for other tasks on the system, because the admin web UI logged me out and took ~30 seconds before giving me a login page again. Now everything seems to be fine but to be safe I should probably reboot the system soon.

This is definitely not a great solution! And obviously as with anything done via the command line is absolutely not supported! But at the time it was a better alternative than waiting an indeterminate number of hours for my hard drives to fill up.

I’d love to hear suggestions as to better options. Is there some way to cancel jobs via the admin UI which I just didn’t see? And is there a way to stop TrueNAS duplicating home directories in the first place?

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