Disk Space Reserve

[Andy_Taylor]

Hi,

Could somebody please clarify for me what the disk space reserve setting actually does when creating a B2D folder.

I have 2 B2D's folder on a large disk that are growing on a daily basis , and i need to cap the disk space they are using.

For example I have a 750gb disk.

2 B2D folders.

1 I want to limit to 200gb
1 i want to limit to 40gb

By this i mean when those limits are reached it will start overwriting files in the folder rather than just keep adding to it and getting bigger.

The 200gb folder is my Exchange data , the other my Domain Active directory data.
Unchecked i am going to be out of disk space soon. I cant work out if i just enter those two figures as the disk space reserve or not. Both Backup jobs are set to Overwrite Media.

Ive searched here and read the documentation but its worded differently everywhere i read it and cant decide if this setting limits the folder size , or whether its the opposite and the 'remainder of the disk' size.

Hope that made some sense...........
Thanks
Andy

[Thomas_Scholz_2]

Andy,

this value does not apply to the amount occupied by the B2D folder but to the amount of free space on the volume/partition on which the B2D folder is. For example

Volume has 500GB in total and two B2D folders A and B
B2DA has configured a reserve of 20GB
B2DB has configured a reserve of 100GB

so ...

Jobs targeting B2DA will stop to run when the volume(!) has less than 20GB of free space.
Jobs targeting B2DB will stop to run when the volume(!) has less than 100GB of free space.

That's all about it.

Thomas

[Andy_Taylor]

So Thomas i if understand this correctly,

I need to set my exchange B2D folder which i want to limit to 200GB a reserve of 550GB.

And my 2nd B2D folder a reserve of 710GB.

hang on , surely that wont work as they are both on the same volume/partition.

Do they need to be on seperate partitions ?

As the 2nd B2D folder will never have 710gb space due to the space taken up by the 1st B2D folder.....hmmmmm

Im still not getting this......apologies

[Thomas_Scholz_2]

That would be correct. But actually does not make real sense.

Unless you set a disk space reserve, Backup Exec writes to disk as long as there is free space (no matter into which B2D folder you write).

Think of a situation where a reserve makes more sense:
You have a drive D: with 20GB and a B2D folder into which you are writing hourly backups of some important data. But at the same time you must ensure that some other operation (maybe a database dump) always has 2GB of free space on that partition. So you set a disk space reserve of maybe 4GB onto the B2D folder. Of course you must ensure that your B2D files get overwritten over and over again (through a combination of overwrite- and append-time periods)

In your case you should make multiple partitions/volumes specifically for your B2D folders. Thus you can also take care of fragmentation, bigger allocation units etc.

The only way I can think of to do what you want would be to use some quota tool that limits the size of your folders. I believe WinServer 2003 R2 has this enhancment. But actually it's more or less the same as individual partitons. Just that you get a bit better handling for de-/increasing space.