[help] I can't remove some BTRFS subvolumes + bonus questions

Hello! My disk space was out of space left, so I decided to remove some snapper snapshot. snapper list listed over 360 snapshots. I removed them, and freed 50Gb of space. One of these hasn’t been deleted successfully:


<span style="color:#323232;">Cannot delete snapshot 166 since it is the next to be mounted snapshot.
</span>

it’s description is writable copy of #156. How can I remove it? should I do it using btrfs subvolume delete?

here’s the output of sudo btrfs subvolume list -t /:


<span style="color:#323232;">ID      gen     top level       path
</span><span style="color:#323232;">--      ---     ---------       ----
</span><span style="color:#323232;">256     178487  5               timeshift-btrfs/snapshots/2023-09-18_18-25-33/@
</span><span style="color:#323232;">257     341688  5               @home
</span><span style="color:#323232;">258     341680  5               @cache
</span><span style="color:#323232;">259     341688  5               @log
</span><span style="color:#323232;">260     26      256             timeshift-btrfs/snapshots/2023-09-18_18-25-33/@/var/lib/portables
</span><span style="color:#323232;">261     27      256             timeshift-btrfs/snapshots/2023-09-18_18-25-33/@/var/lib/machines
</span><span style="color:#323232;">708     341688  5               @
</span><span style="color:#323232;">710     341680  708             .snapshots
</span><span style="color:#323232;">2781    178991  5               timeshift-btrfs/snapshots/2024-05-07_12-20-43/@
</span><span style="color:#323232;">2968    326034  710             .snapshots/166/snapshot
</span><span style="color:#323232;">2969    341679  710             .snapshots/167/snapshot
</span>

all those timeshift subvolumes are there because before snapper, I used to use timeshift. I tried to remove them:


<span style="color:#323232;">sudo btrfs subvolume delete timeshift-btrfs/snapshots/2023-09-18_18-25-33/@/var/lib/machines    
</span><span style="color:#323232;">ERROR: Could not statfs: No such file or directory
</span>

If I understand correctly, it means that I should give an actual “system” path instead of the path in the table, but I don’t understand which path

thanks in advance to everyone!

mrvictory1,

sudo mount -o subvolid=5 /dev/<your disk here> /mntThis will give you full access to the filesystem, then you can identify the full path of snapshots and delete them ie. sudo btrfs subvolume delete /mnt/…In openSUSE, snapper works by booting to a snapshot. “mount” command will reveal which subvolume you are booted from.

tubbadu,

Thanks for the answer! I mounted it and removed all the timeshift-btrfs stuff. now, after a reboot, sudo btrfs subvolume list -t / does not show timeshift stuffs anymore, but if I mount again sudo mount -o subvolid=5 /dev/nvme0n1p2 /mnt and ls /mnt/ I get:


<span style="color:#323232;">@  @cache  @home  @log  timeshift-btrfs
</span>

how can I remove timeshift-btrfs from there? can i just rm -rf it?

In openSUSE

(sorry I forgot to mention, I’m running EndeavourOS)

mrvictory1,

Make sure it doesn’t have anything valuable. Use rm -rf

tubbadu, (edited )

It worked, thank you very much for your help man! Now the only remaining problem is the snapshot 166, that snapper does not let me remove. I assume I should remove in a similar way as timeshift:


<span style="color:#323232;">$ sudo btrfs subvolume delete /.snapshots/166/snapshot
</span><span style="color:#323232;">WARNING: not deleting default subvolume id 2968 '/.snapshots/166/snapshot'
</span>

I think there’s something I’m missing about how these snapshot works

mrvictory1,

The snapshot may be mounted to root. In the output of “mount” command, if there isn’t a subvolid= or subvol= parameter for root mount, snapshot 166 is currently mounted to root.

just_another_person,

I would run a check, then balance, then see if it’s still throwing errors. It sounds like something has caught, but if there’s an errant snapshot I wouldn’t worry about it.

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