Let's Talk About The Endlessly Mysterious "IX-Applications" Snapshots

I read around, and saw perpetually conflicting information about the automatically created snapshots of the “IX-Applications” dataset. I upgrade an application, and am left with snapshots that are set to never delete. The upgrade went well, so I will never need them…

Okay, so can they be deleted or not? Who knows.

Common sense would say that being set to never delete would eventually use your disk space, so they must be something you can delete or they’d eventually fill your storage… Okay, so I go manually select the snapshots and click delete.

Everything still works, but I can’t remove this “snapshot”… Now I have to wonder. Did I break something? Again, who knows.

I’m reminded of FreeNAS. You know, the predecessor to TrueNAS that advertised BSD jails as a feature, but then would say “jails don’t work, why are you using them” when you had an issue? That morphed into TrueNAS w/Kubernetes… That morphed into TrueNAS w/Docker now… The only thing that hasn’t changed is that managing the backend never seems to work as expected.

So I present a novel idea. Let’s focus on giving users a way to take a snapshot of the apps, and rollback to a point in time if we need to. Enough with the conflicting information about whether we can manage the apps or not… If we can snapshot the dataset manually, or not… And let’s make things that are presented in the GUI work as expected.

Sorry, but I think the devs are deserving of a bit of criticism here. I’ve been in the FreeNAS/TrueNAS game for a decade or more, and the backend jails/kubernetes/docker system seems to always be an unpolished work in progress.

Now if someone can kindly tell me what the error I’ve shown is about, and how to delete it, that would be great.

See? Either nobody knows the answer, or nobody wants to admit it’s endlessly broken.

I guess the mystery will continue.

Use storage type Host Path instead of the default ixVolume storage type. That way you get full control over where data is stored. You can create your own datasets, setup snapshot rules, configure backup, etc.

I have Host Path storage on all of my apps, I don’t have any snapshots related to any ix-apps dataset.

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