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

TrueNAS General
1

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.

Screenshot_20241104_141022
Screenshot_20241104_141022797×256 19.9 KB

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.

2

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

I guess the mystery will continue.

3

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.

2 Likes
4

How would I do that at this point? All I did was follow the standard installation, and I’m happy with it. I just want to delete the snapshots for old versions, and I cannot find a straight answer anywhere.

How are these managed, and when do they get deleted since we’re forced to have them created?

Thanks for the help…

5

To quote the documentation https://www.truenas.com/docs/truenasapps/

ixVolumes are not recommended for permanent storage volumes, they are intended for rapid storage for a test deployment of the container. We recommend adding datasets and configuring the container storage volumes with the host path option.

I have not seen a supported way to delete snapshots of ixVolumes. Maybe that is something that will be added in the future. Of course you can delete snapshots with the appropriate CLI commands.

6

It gets worse, because now I read that the “ix-applications” dataset is just a remnant, because things are really stored in a hidden “ix-apps” dataset since 24.10. So now I don’t even know if I need that dataset at all anymore.

Straight answers about the endlessly changing implementation of apps (or jails, etc… from FreeNAS days) is a constant sticking point. It feels like IX just uses these add ons as a marketing ploy more than anything else.

For me, nothing other than the app (syncthing) is running… All the data being synced is contained in proper datasets outside the ixVolumes scheme. I’m trying to find if I can truly just delete the “ix-applications” (and thus snapshots) completely now?

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I’d say it is safe to remove if everything migrated successfully.
Quote from https://forums.truenas.com/t/deleting-apps-from-ui-is-not-deleting-app-data-from-ix-apps-dataset/12819:

1 Like
8

As @bacon said. This is also documented in the section on the ix-apps dataset (and note about ix-applications) here:

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9

Thanks for the information, everyone. I’ll delete the old “ix-application” dataset.

10

Hi everyone,

I have some apps running. All with standard configuration.

This week I got the „more than 10.000 snapshots warning“.

Unfortunately I’m not a Unix guy at all…. So I would appreciate some help and confirmation.

The best way to solve this is to change the storage type from ‚iXvolume‘ to ‚Host Path‘. Correct?

Can that be done with already existing apps? It’s greyed out in my case, also for apps in status ‚stopped‘. I could only add additional storage.

If not, that means I have to delete all apps and set them up from the beginning with correct storage type. Correct?

After that is done, how get I rid of the unnecessary snapshots and probably even unnecessary datasets?

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No idea. What makes you think the snapshots have anything to do with your apps at all?

If you want to find out, you can run sudo zfs list -t snapshot | grep ix-apps | wc -l from the shell, and see what number it gives you.

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Well, everything that’s written above.

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I won’t ask about the mental gymnastics that led you to connect what’s written above to the warning you’re seeing (because I’m sure not seeing it), but did you try running the command I gave?

14

I get ‚namespace sudo not found‘

15

I read serveral threads here and in old forum. Maybe this one was not the best to step in, but there are many post complaining that apps produce hundreds and thousands of snapshots that are never deleted.
The ‚normal‘ snapshots configured via GUI are only around 300.

16

That’s, um, unexpected. You were at the shell prompt when you typed that? You didn’t include the ` characters?

If you were at the shell prompt, and didn’t include the ` characters, can you share a screen shot?

17

won’t work :frowning_with_open_mouth:

An error occurred: Sorry, you can’t embed media items in a post.

18

When you joined the forum, you got a DM inviting you to take a tutorial. Find that DM and complete the tutorial and your permissions will increase, including being able to attach images.

19

ok, thank you. Will do!

For the time beeing a text coyp of what I see:

C:\>ssh truenas_admin@10.1.1.202
(truenas_admin@10.1.1.202) Password:
Linux truenas 6.12.15-production+truenas #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Thu Jul 31 02:05:00 UTC 2025 x86_64

        TrueNAS (c) 2009-2025, iXsystems, Inc. dba TrueNAS
        All rights reserved.
        TrueNAS code is released under the LGPLv3 and GPLv3 licenses with some
        source files copyrighted by (c) iXsystems, Inc. All other components
        are released under their own respective licenses.

        For more information, documentation, help or support, go here:
        http://truenas.com

Warning: the supported mechanisms for making configuration changes
are the TrueNAS WebUI, CLI, and API exclusively. ALL OTHERS ARE
NOT SUPPORTED AND WILL RESULT IN UNDEFINED BEHAVIOR AND MAY
RESULT IN SYSTEM FAILURE.

Welcome to TrueNAS
Last login: Mon Aug  4 12:25:26 2025 from 10.1.1.180
[truenas]> sudo zfs list -t snapshot | grep ix-apps | wc -l
Namespace sudo not found
[truenas]>
20

Based on the prompt [truenas]> and that response, you seem to be in the TrueNAS CLI, not the base shell. You likely have the default shell for truenas_admin set to it. Try using exit to see if that gets you back to the linux shell.