Out of disk Storage

[nmfixme]

I have run out of Disk storage on  the S: drive where the backups are done. S: drive currently 2TB max and cant increase as running on VMware., is there anything i can archive from the S: drive, catalogs etc to free up space. Even expiring existing backups hasn't helped. can we archive files in S:\BackupExecDeduplicationStorageFolder\data or any other folder. Thanks., Running Backup exec 2014. ATM can't back up anything to disk so only going to tape.

[Gurvinder]

from command prompt -> BE Install Path -> run the command

crstats.exe --verbose --convert-size

Check the space needs compaction size. If it is quite large, run the below command to free up some space.

crcontrol.exe --compactstart 100 0 1
To monitor compaction command - crcontrol.exe --compactstate

If the space needs compaction is not much, then you will need to follow the article https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/article.100008765 to reclaim space by deleting Backup Sets. When Backup sets are deleted , 2 rounds of Queue Processing needs to be run to show the updated results (by default they run automatically in 12 hours interval 12:20 and 00:20) but you can trigger it by running crcontrol.exe --processqueue (run this 2 times and you can monitor this by running crcontrol.exe --processqueueinfo. When the Status shows Busy: NO and Pending : NO then queue processing is completed). You can then rerun the crstats.exe --convert-size command to check space occupied within containers

Note : Due to the nature and way Deduplication algorithms work, if the same data is referenced by other backup sets, then even if you get rid of a few Backups sets it may not show that much of space release. More the dedupe ratio, more the number of sets required to be deleted to regain the space.

FYI - Dedupe queue processing improvements have happened over the years BE 2012 -> BE 2014,15,16 and now with BE 20, 20.1 they are even better.

[Dale_Mahalko_LH]

Regarding your 2TB max volume size, if you have more actual space available in the VMWare management console, it's not VMWare causing that limit.

Rather your Windows data drive was partitioned using MBR rather than GPT. MBR drives have a maximum volume size of 2TB. If you increase the VMDK size, the MBR partitioning prevents resizing the partitions bigger to use the extra space.

There are not any easy fixes for this, especially if NTFS security has be used to protect files/folders.

You would need to:

1. Shut down all services / software that tries to read or write to the 2TB drive, and set these to Disabled in Services
2. transfer all the data out of the 2TB to secondary storage formatted with NTFS that you trust as reliable (with RAID if needed for reliability)
3. remove the VMDK volume in VMWare for the virtual machine
4. make a new blank volume in VMWare for the virtual machine
5. In Windows Disk Management, make it a GPT volume, partition it, format it, and assign it the same drive letter as the old MBR volume
6. copy all the original data from secondary storage, back to the new GPT volume
7. Resume services that use the volume letter and make sure the security is correct and they are working properly.

,

Another option, if you can deal with some weirdness and you know that there are a huge number of files all concentrated in a single directory, you can actually mount a completely different disk volume to a directory path inside an existing volume.

This can effectively extend the size of an MBR volume past 2TB by hanging additional volumes off of it, via directory paths on the 2TB MBR volume.

In Windows Disk Management, select the additional empty volume, right-click and choose "Assign drive letter or path", then use the path option to map it to a directory within the existing volume.

Note that the target directory needs to be empty when you do this. If you are trying to enlarge the size of an existing directory, you need to rename the original, map the additional volume to the original directory name, and then move data from the original directory into the new directory.

I have no idea how a program like Backup Exec may react to this. As far as I am aware, doing this is transparent to software and it will treat this volume-as-directory as a normal directory.