Suggestion: Snapshot Now button in GUI

TrueNAS General
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Yesterday I finished torturing my primary NAS with its rejiggered SVDEV, larger record sizes, and rebalancing. Time to turn snapshots back on and replicating to the backup server again.

Replication cannot start until a snapshot has been been taken, so the “run now” command in replication will fail with “you gots no snapshot to replicate, lugnut!”

There does not seem to be a “snapshot now” button in the GUI menu under the snapshot task pane. Did I miss it somewhere? If it’s not there, why not? One can invoke snapshot now from the CLI, however.

I wonder if as part of a process improvement iXsystems could consider the following suggestion:

  1. Install a “snapshot now” button in the GUI for snapshot tasks just like in the replication GUI menus.

  2. if the NAS is asked to replicate a pool and no snapshot is present but snapshot tasks are available to be run, for the GUI to ask the user “hey, I cannot replicate until we have a snapshot, shall we run your snapshot tasks and see if that fixes the issue?” … and if yes, run the replication task….

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For the first part, you need to go to Storage > Snapshots and click ADD.

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Apologies for confusion.

The snapshots tasks are there. But there doesn’t seem to be an obvious way to kick off a snapshot immediately the way there is for replication tasks. Ie no “run now”.

At least under Core 13.

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Right, the snapshot tasks are under Tasks > Periodic Snapshot Tasks, but if you want to take a single snapshot, you do that from Storage > Snapshots.

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I think what @Constantin is suggesting is similar to what “Syncoid” does. It creates a snapshot on-demand when you trigger a replication.

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Thank you for that, it didn’t occur to me that the “snapshot now” button would be in that section of the UI. I wonder if the team could still consider a ”run now” button also as part of each snapshot task just like the replication task menu items do.

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Great suggestion @Constantin ! We will draft up a feature addition scope and get it added to our backlog, no promises on if/when it gets added, but these are the types of ideas we like to see from the community!

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Can I also suggest that “Add” button in the current Storage / Snapshot GUI menu be changed to “Snapshot Now”?

The reason I suggest is that “Add” is not as descriptive re: the function of the button as “Snapshot Now”. The latter tells the user clearly what its function is, “Add” does not.

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More great feedback, noted and will be looked at.

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Along similar lines, would you mind consider adding a “scrub now!” button to the scrub task menu under Tasks/Scrub/ so it’s not just accessible from Pools/Storage/Scrub Pool?

Or a “run now” option for every task in the task list to see if the task can execute as expected. It would simply make all the tasks menus there a bit more consistent and make trouble-shooting / setup a bit easier.

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