Schedule snapshots, scrubs & SMART

Create a policy explicitly

Upgrading does not create scheduled work. Choose a target and job type, set a five-field cron expression and time zone, then review the policy. Typing ENABLE <name> authorizes recurring actions and applicable retention deletions.

Understand scheduling

Examples: 0 * * * * hourly; 0 2 * * * daily at 02:00; 0 3 * * 0 Sunday at 03:00. When both day-of-month and weekday are restricted, both must match. Prefer UTC if you need an unambiguous cadence across daylight-saving changes.

Keep retention scoped

Retention removes only the owning policy’s snapshots on the exact dataset, keeps the newest configured count, and skips held snapshots and snapshots with clones. There is no recursive retention.

Read run outcomes

Overlapping host work is deferred. Downtime coalesces missed schedules into one run; interrupted jobs become Unknown and are not replayed automatically. Scrub and SMART submission success means the host accepted the command. Follow Operations or recorded self-test results to verify completion. Stagger SMART tests and scrub windows.