Red Hat build of MicroShift

Deleting a volume snapshot

To clean up unneeded snapshots and free storage resources, delete volume snapshots by setting a deletion policy that controls whether the underlying content is retained or removed.

Procedure

Specify the deletion policy that you require in the VolumeSnapshotClass object, as shown in the following example:

Example volumesnapshotclass.yaml file

apiVersion: snapshot.storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: VolumeSnapshotClass
metadata:
  name: csi-hostpath-snap
driver: hostpath.csi.k8s.io
deletionPolicy: Delete
# ...

When deleting the volume snapshot, if deletionPolicy is set to Delete, the underlying snapshot is deleted along with the VolumeSnapshotContent object. If the Retain value is set, both the underlying snapshot and VolumeSnapshotContent object remain.

If the Retain value is set and the VolumeSnapshot object is deleted without deleting the corresponding VolumeSnapshotContent object, the content remains. The snapshot itself is also retained in the storage back end.

Delete the volume snapshot by entering the following command:
```
$ oc delete volumesnapshot <volumesnapshot_name>
```
Replace <volumesnapshot_name> with the name of the volume snapshot you want to delete.
Example output
```
volumesnapshot.snapshot.storage.k8s.io "mysnapshot" deleted
```
If the deletion policy is set to Retain, delete the volume snapshot content by entering the following command:
```
$ oc delete volumesnapshotcontent <volumesnapshotcontent_name>
```
Replace <volumesnapshotcontent_name> with the content you want to delete.

Optional: If the VolumeSnapshot object is not successfully deleted, enter the following command to remove any finalizers for the leftover resource so that the delete operation can continue:

Only remove the finalizers if you are confident that there are no existing references from either persistent volume claims or volume snapshot contents to the VolumeSnapshot object. Even with the --force option, the delete operation does not delete snapshot objects until all finalizers are removed.

$ oc patch -n $PROJECT volumesnapshot/$NAME --type=merge -p '{"metadata": {"finalizers":null}}'

Example output

volumesnapshotclass.snapshot.storage.k8s.io "csi-ocs-rbd-snapclass" deleted

The finalizers are removed and the volume snapshot is deleted.