NetApp: Disabling snapshot for a volume on Data OnTAP

This is one of those things that isn't always very obvious. Sometimes, you need to disable snapshots for a volume.

Why in the world would someone want to disable a perfectly good feature of NetApp NAS Storage? Server/data migration for one. Disabling it temporarily will prevent the volume from filling up the snapshot directory. Maybe your volume doesn't need snapshots (data always changing, and can not be recoverable even with snapshots- such as oracle data dirs, in which case snapshots are useless).
You have to perform simple but important tasks. If your volume has a schedule, turn it off.

somefiler> snap sched rootvol Volume rootvol: 2 4 8@2,4,6,12,164
somefiler> snap sched rootvol 0 0 0 
somefiler> snap sched rootvol Volume rootvol: 0 0 0

That takes care of that. Next step is to disable the automatic snapshot option.

somefiler> vol options rootvol nosnap on

Now if you issue vol options rootvol You should see an option that says nosnap=on.

Lastly, you'll probably want to disable the display of the .snapshot directory. Not really a biggie if the qtree/vol is NTFS security style. But in UNIX, you'll see ".snapshot" in ls -la.

somefiler> vol options rootvol nosnapdir on

Voila! Now it is completely removed.

-A