How to size guest file indexing?

[karsten123]

Hi,
we activated file indexing for all Windows VMs to use malware detection via extensions and inline detection. The used space for these indexes is significantly growing. 10% are processing 3 times a day and another 10% run every hour.
How can we calculate the estimated required space? Does it even makes sense to do so?
Thx
Karsten

[Gostev]

Hi, index size should be negligible comparing to restore point size. If you see them taking significant amount of disk space (in comparison to the size of actual backups) then something is completely off and it's worth investigating with support.

Estimating is going to be hard because it depends on the number of files on each machine, which can vary by many order of magnitude from machine to machine. And usually does not make sense to do indeed, because index size should be tiny comparing to the size of image-level backup it accompanies.

Thanks

[HannesK]

Hello,
there are different scenarios depending on whether Enterprise Manager is used, whether Enterprise Manager is used on the backup server or separately and whether and the IndexRetentionDays (new in 12.2) registry key is used. Enterprise Manager has a separate retention setting. So the first thing to find out is how long you store the index.

If you only have Windows, then in worst case we have seen 75MB per 1M files. For Linux 20 MB. On average I just say "50MB per 1M files". All these values are uncompressed. After two days without access to the index, it will be compressed. On average compression will reduce size by 4x.

Does that help to do the math?

Best regards,
Hannes