Currently I have 16 VMs backing up daily, and keeping 15 snapshots - and I have another 3 backups, but they aren't currently running on a schedule. I'm trying to figure out why I have so much data on disk.
One of the VMs in particular is using 4.9TB of disk space for backups. If I were to look at the VM in Archiware, I can see the disk size is 1TB, and the 15 day incrementals add up to 2TB. So, in my mind, if the base backup was the entire size of the VM, then it should not take up more than 3TB of disk space.
This is just the worst example, but overall I am consuming more than 6TB of space that shouldn't be there. And I am not doing any cloud backups, so these 15 snapshots are all that I have.
Anyone else have similar issues and figured out why this is happening?
Hello,
You can check how much space each backup takes by selecting VM and clicking Backup Administration located on the right side of the screen. Submenu Overview shows last 7 backups for each VM and size of each.
Pure (and all other backup software used for backing up vmware's VM-s) depends on the vmware to report which parts of disks were changed between two points in time. This enables fastest and least space consuming backups.
However sometimes vmware resets this tracking of used disk parts and as a result next backup is full backup (instead of incremental) and uses a lot of space.
Please monitor Overview window for problematic VM-s and check if there are occasional full backups as that would explain large disk usage. Your number of kept snapshots is relatively big and this increases the chance of tracking reset...
For more info you could check this vmware article: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1020128
