# Can anyone explain the new freebsd-update / bectl / snapshot behavior?



## jrehmer (Aug 17, 2022)

I updated several FreeBSD servers yesterday and all went well so I went to sleep.  This morning everything seemed fine, but this evening I was alerted that some services weren't functioning correctly and found multiple servers out of disk space.  These servers previously couldn't run out of disk space as the service use a cyclical buffer atop the filesystem and never consume more than that space.  Logs are rotated meticulously and typically maintain less than 10GB of free space on all servers.

I'm perplexed this change was not announced as introducing snapshots and additional boot environments on boxes with limited space seems like a *really* bad idea.  Initially, while hunting to figure out how I ran out of space I found a snapshot.  I do not use snapshots or boot environments, and leverage underlying hypervisor features for these purposes.


```
root@feed1:/ # zfs list -t snapshot
NAME                                       USED  AVAIL     REFER  MOUNTPOINT
zroot/ROOT/default@2022-08-16-01:55:43-0  19.0G      -     31.1G  -
```

After searching where this snapshot came from I found: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/freebsd-update-8-and-boot-environments.84822/

I'm even less familiar with the usage of boot environments, but it seems like in some cases it is using more space than probably intended:

```
root@feed1:/ # bectl list
BE                             Active Mountpoint Space Created
13.1-RELEASE_2022-08-16_015543 -      -          26.6G 2022-08-16 01:55
default                        NR     /          57.8G 2022-06-03 17:26
```

Is this causing issues for others?  Should I have known or expected this, and if so where should I have looked so I don't run into this kind of situation in the future?  I see there is an option 'CreateBootEnv' in /etc/freebsd-update.conf, which I assume I will want to use to disable this functionality, but would like to see feedback from other administrators as to how they are handling these changes in freebsd-update.


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