Hello ,

Thank you for your question. Let me cover your question.

First of all, let's analyze your case.

• You have a machine with 170GB of data. This data is increasing approximately by 1 GB per year.
• You set a schedule to perform a full backup once a month and block-level every day. So every month you have a blockchain that contains one full backup and 27 - 30 blocks.
• You set a retention policy to store each version for 2 months. It means that a backup chain will be deleted when the last block(block-level backup) of this chain reaches the age of 2 months.
• It is an Image-Based backup. Even if it seems that your machine has not made any changes to the disk, it is. Therefore every block-level backup consumes some space on your storage.

These conditions lead us to this situation. You can go to the backup storage tab and see the amount of data each backup operation takes. I hope it will shed some light on that situation.

I send you a link to our KB article on how our retention policy works - Block-Level Backup Explained

Could you please tell me the following:

• Why do you select the image-based backup? Have you considered file level backups?
• What is this machine?
• What kind of data does it contain?

Thank you!

Hi Klim
Thank you for your response. This is a Windows Server 2012 R2 that serves as a Remote Desktop server for 7 users. I may want to restore the image to Azure at some point, which is why I chose Image over File backups. The data it contains is a basic office environment: Office 365 and all web-based apps and most of the data used is all in the shared drive. I think my problem will be solved if I just change the Retention Policy to just keep 3 versions of each file. I'm ok with this if it will keep my data transfers low and cloud storage won't exceed 1TB. Is this correct? Should I be doing anything differently?

Hello ,

Thank you for the explanation. If keeping only the last 3 versions suits you, so yes you can simply change the retention policy. Because keeping only the last 3 versions, in your case, will significantly reduce the used storage space. Please note, that you've already hit the limit, therefore you should delete the old backup chains manually. You can do it at the Backup Storage tab. Select the oldest full backup and delete it. It will automatically delete all related blocks.

I hope you read the article I sent you. Anyway, please take a look at the gif explaining how the version storage policy below works.