Setting disk usage quotas per archive.
Hi!
I'm a new guy here, our company is planning to migrate to Acronis Backup 11.5 since none of the current backup solutions we run meets our needs fully.
I'm using a test universal license and I can perform most of the things I need however, I can't figure out how to set up disk usage quota per archive so that every machine (or group of machines) uses no more disk space that I decide to dedicate.
I've found a workaround by creating a vault for each group and configuring quota on folder level in Windows, however this is no way a solution because first of all I'd like to deal with all the settings inside Acronis environment and besides, I can't accept this solution because of the limitation of 20 Vaults per backup node which technically means that I need to set up a new backup node once I want to backup more than 20 users.
Another reason not to have too many vaults is that deduplication is not recommended for more than one vaults, however I'd like to use this feature for all my backups (or at least most of them).
Please, share your thoughts, how were you able to solve this problem?
Thanks!
Dear Elenal!
Thanks for your reply. I understand what you mean and I've read this part of the documentation already, however, I'm looking for something different, i.e. for LIMITING the archive size, so that if the archive size becomes X GB, I want to prevent following backups from being run and not just to delete the old ones.
My goal is to provide a backup service for our customers and what we have in contract is eg. "Backup: Size - 10TB, history - 1 year". I want to be notified that the backup has stopped due to the archive is full and notify the customer of the situation for him to make a decision, whether he wants to upgrade his storage space or decrease the archive history period or something else.
As for the deduplication algorithm, I totally agree with you, however, if I dedicate a separate Vault to every customer, all the deduplication data is still stored on the same vault so I may not care about the archive size, just relay on the quota settings of the vault, however, the limitation of 20 vaults per storage node drives this solution impossible.
BTW, what is the background of this limitation? Are you planning to remove/increase this limitation in the future?
Thanks!
And one more thing, under "Retention Rules" pop-up window there's a radio button "Age and size", however, the only option that can be used, when this radio button is selected, is "backups older than n Day(s)/Week(s)/Month(s)".
I'm using "Acronis Backup Advanced (Version 11.5 Update 6) Acronis Backup Management Server (Build 11.5.43956).
The other radio button is "Number of backups in the archive exceeds n"
So, no word about the archive size in this window.
If you "want to prevent following backups from being run and not just to delete the old ones." you can disable a specific backup plan in UI or by this command: http://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/documentation/AcronisBackup_11.5/i…
However, it's not easy to track the space occupied by client's backups automatically, even if you dedicate a separate Vault to every Customer. There is no "vault quota" in Acronis Backup:
There are no settings for limiting a vault size or number of backups in a vault. You can limit the size of each archive using cleanup. However, the total size of archives stored in the vault is limited by the storage size only.
http://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/documentation/AcronisBackup_11.5/i…
I'd rather suggest that you pay attention to the Acronis Backup Cloud product (http://www.acronis.com/en-us/provider/backup-cloud/), designed exactly for service providers. The "hard quota" functionality (exactly what you need) will be added in the nearest updates. Right now, if you are a service provider, you will receive an email when a client organization exceeds its quota. You can then disable the organization, but they will not be able to log in at all. (I assume you want them to be able to restore.)
As regards to "size" selector, it's missing exactly because you back up to a deduplicating vault. If you change the destination, it will appear.
Hello Elenal and thanks for your reply!
If you "want to prevent following backups from being run and not just to delete the old ones." you can disable a specific backup plan in UI or by this command: http://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/documentation/AcronisBackup_11.5/i…
However, it's not easy to track the space occupied by client's backups automatically, even if you dedicate a separate Vault to every Customer. There is no "vault quota" in Acronis Backup:
Of course, the idea is to track the usage and perform any actions automatically.
There's really no "Vault Quota", however, I can work around this issue by setting a quota on the folder in Windows and this works just perfectly, since it also limits the Vault size for Acronis thus enabling Acronis to benefit from all the features, like sending notifications when the Vault is getting full etc.
There are no settings for limiting a vault size or number of backups in a vault. You can limit the size of each archive using cleanup. However, the total size of archives stored in the vault is limited by the storage size only.
http://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/documentation/AcronisBackup_11.5/i…I'd rather suggest that you pay attention to the Acronis Backup Cloud product (http://www.acronis.com/en-us/provider/backup-cloud/), designed exactly for service providers. The "hard quota" functionality (exactly what you need) will be added in the nearest updates. Right now, if you are a service provider, you will receive an email when a client organization exceeds its quota. You can then disable the organization, but they will not be able to log in at all. (I assume you want them to be able to restore.)
Currently we don't plan to use any third party storage services due to several reasons.
As regards to "size" selector, it's missing exactly because you back up to a deduplicating vault. If you change the destination, it will appear.
About the size selector - super, thanks! It was not there just because the Vault was created with deduplication enabled. (would be good if that was mentioned in that part of the documentation also).
Can you please also answer my question about the limitation of the number of vaults per storage node?
Thanks!
Hello Edvard,
As per developers, the limitation of 20 vaults is obsolete. If you DO NOT use deduplication, you can create more vaults (100 is a proven number). Additional vaults do not load the storage node because it does not perform any periodic operation with vaults. The real limitation in this case is the number of agents that back up simultaneously to the same ASN - maximum 100 agents.
With deduplication, a single vault is a strict recommendation. Don't even try to use more :)
Thank you for your questions! We'll fix the doc according to the new info.