Balancing space on extents in our SOBR

[brendan]

Hi

we have three extents in our SOBR, the "second" one was filling up faster then the other two, so I thought I'd try moving the backup files of a VM from that to an emptier extent (#three)

I followed the instructions here

Everything worked fine (ie the new backup files for the VM I moved, are being created on the emptier extent #three along with the existing files) - except it didn't free up any space on the second extent, so it's still relatively low on space.

I saw a couple of comments elsewhere saying you need to wait a while for the space to free up, it's been a couple of weeks now with no change.
I've rebooted the server, but it's made no difference.

Is there anything else I could try to reclaim the space I was hoping to free up?

We're still on Veeam B&R 10, the extents are all ReFS.

cheers
Brendan

[HannesK]

Hello,
and welcome to the forums.

With REFS, you always want to have all files of a backup chain on the same extent. Otherwise you lose fast clone / block cloning https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=110

I don't know what exactly you moved, but if you moved a block-cloned full for example, then it's normal that you have only very little more free space. Block cloned fulls are "spaceless fulls". See also this blog post https://www.veeam.com/blog/advanced-ref ... suite.html

If you moved a completed backup chain, there must be more free space. That's native Windows "move & paste" as far as I understood you. That's out of Veeam scope

Best regards,
Hannes

[brendan]

thanks for the welcome/reply

yeah, I moved all the full and incremental backups for the specific vm from one extent to another (didn't move the vbm file)

ie (apologies for the crap formatting)

Code: Select all

before the move:		after the move:

extent 2			extent 2
Backup_job.vbm			Backup_job.vbm
vm1-2021-03-01.vbk		vm1-2021-03-01.vbk
vm1-2021-03-02.vib		vm1-2021-03-02.vib
vm1-2021-03-03.vib		vm1-2021-03-03.vib
vm2-2021-03-01.vbk
vm2-2021-03-02.vib
vm2-2021-03-03.vib

extent 3			extent 3
Backup_job.vbm			Backup_job.vbm
vm3-2021-03-01.vbk		vm2-2021-03-01.vbk
vm3-2021-03-02.vib		vm2-2021-03-02.vib
vm3-2021-03-03.vib		vm2-2021-03-03.vib
				vm3-2021-03-01.vbk
				vm3-2021-03-02.vib
				vm3-2021-03-03.vib

I was a bit surprised when the space on the extent 2 didn't change :/
I'll take a look at the link you provided and see what else I can find more specifically related to ReFS/Windows

thanks

[HannesK]

yep, that looks like the effects of "spaceless full backup" aka fastclone.