Deduplication Folder Space Issue

[StefanW]

Hello,

I've been testing the deduplication storage folder option for a couple of weeks, and I've noticed that even after I erase media from the device, the used capacity doesn't decrease.
Because of this, I can no longer create new jobs to the existing folder.
Is this expected behaviour, or is there something I've missed?

[Ben_L_ · Accepted solution]

This is actually expected behavior.  Now let me explain.

With the way the deduplication runs it looks at all the data being backed up and all the data that has been backed up and keeps track of it so that it does not have any duplicate data.  So what happens when you run an erase job it does not actually delete any data like it would with a normal B2D folder.  When you run an erase job it marks the data as overwritable or able to delete.  Now there is also a process called the garbage collected, this runs in 12 hour intervals.  The first time it runs it looks for data to be marked as able to delete or overwritable and marks the data that was either moved to scratch media or an erase job was run on, but does not actually delete the files at this time.  The second time it runs it will remove these files, so it could take up to 24 hours to free up space.

There are two ways around this currently.
1. Grow the volume to a larger size if you are able to.
2. Move the dedup folder to a larger volume.

Unfortunately there is no way to manually or force the garbage collector to run at this time.

I hope all of that makes sense, let me know if you have any questions on it.