Acronis Utility Snapshots not set to expire in Scale/HC3 environment
We're rapidly running out of space on one of our Scale clusters after deploying Acronis Cyber Protect 15. They use HC3 and that's what we got licenses for and everything has been working great for weeks and 100% of the backups on all 50 or so VMs have been backing up fine to our external 60TB or so NAS. Now, they're stalled because our smallest cluster is at 70% HDD usage, which is when Scale switches off inbound snapshot replications and self-created snapshots.
I investigated and on our primary file server VM, for example, all the "Acronis Utility Snapshots" are not set to expire ever:
The other snapshots listed are for our normal Scale Cluster to other Scale Cluster snapshot and replication system. We use both because Acronis dumps to a NAS and our retention in Acronis Cyber Protect is 6 months and in Scale it's more like 2-3 days. We can recover from the Scale replication quite literally instantly and much slower and more distant back in time using Acronis. So we do want both running but wow is that a lot of space.
So on every single VM there are exactly 3 Acronis utility snapshots with the oldest always being the largest. This happens regardless of which of the 3 plans we made that it's a member of in Cyber Protect. Some of them are very large and going back to May though. We're run far more than 3 backup cycles so I assume Acronis' Cyber Protect software is silently deleting those snapshots itself, however, when the TIBX file safely hits the NAS, why are all these snapshots still here?
The biggest problem is that the Scale Cluster to Scale Cluster replication is also picking up these "Acronis Utility Snapshots" and replicating them to our smallest cluster offsite, which is why it's out of room.
So we have the real VM. Then we have the snapshot. Then the replicated snapshot on the backup Scale Cluster. Then the Acronis utility snapshot. Then the TIBX file on the NAS. Then the Acronis utility snapshot replicated to the backup Scale Cluster. That's 6 copies of the same data.
Is there a way to have Acronis stop leaving those snapshots there? Does it even need them? What happens if we manually delete them?
Also, more of a question for Scale themselves, but can we get Scale to stop replicating snapshots with that title or of that type?
Other info: "Change Block Tracking" is turned on, but only for one of our 3 plans
Backup Consolidation is set to "No" because I couldn't figure out what the description meant
Compression is set to normal
sector by sector is off
use VSS is set to "No" and also "No" in the VM config options
Schedule on one of our plans is "Weekly full, daily incremental," mon-fri 8 at night with weekly retention of 26 weeks and daily retention of days

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Thanks for the reply! If I turn off CBT, will it stop storing them and delete them as soon as the backup completes?
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CEC-P wrote:Thanks for the reply! If I turn off CBT, will it stop storing them and delete them as soon as the backup completes?
If you also apply this solution and make it's settled properly in the host yes: https://kb.acronis.com/content/69605
Thanks in advance!
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