Your A3 Is Consuming Too Much Data

Problem: Your A3 is taking up more disk space than you want.

Solution: Manually bulk-delete versions, then run a refCheck from the shell

Note: This article refers to shell commands that must be run within your A3 docker container. To log into your A3 docker container directly, you usually use SSH port 222. If you have further questions about this procedure, please contact Quadric Support.

Your A3 uses global data deduplication to greatly reduce the amount of storage space your backups consume. Over time, as new backups are protected, old ones are deleted according to your retention settings.

To manually bulk-delete versions, please read this KB article:

https://docs.quadricsoftware.com/kb/guides/manual-backup-version-retention/

After any backup is deleted, your A2 does not instantly reclaim the space. Instead, in the background, the A2 finds blocks that are no longer referenced and deletes them. This process is called background purge, and you can force it to run by dropping to the shell (option 4) and typing

/usr/local/sbin/refCheck 0

for onsite, or

/usr/local/sbin/refCheck 1

for offsite.

This command may take some time to complete, perhaps hours. After it completes, if you go to the A2 dashboard and check under "Approx. Stored", this number should have decreased.

IF you feel this number is inaccurate, please see the following KB:

https://docs.quadricsoftware.com/kb/articles/dashboard-approx-stored-is-innacurate/