I have a backup request to backup a new file share location (a file share) that handles image files (not sure of type or format). Currently the size is about 500 GB (number of files is unknown at this time), but there is some talk of it becoming larger to possibly > 10 TB (or ultimately “many new files being constantly moved in and out of this folder at regular times” vs total size of the folder). We are backing up a lot more than this of “unique data” across the systems so 10-20 TB is not a huge amount of “new unique data” being backed up, but its enough to make me reconsider just adding it without some thought.
Currently all of my backup storage policies use DDB’s (we have a few). I did not set any of the storage policies we have up, just inherited it all.
If I used our ‘standard” storage policy for our file shares (that all use DDB’s), would the (possible) size of > 10 TB of image files blow up my DDB’s or cause some unintended consequences to the DDB (as the data will likely not Dedup well), or do DDB’s only contain references/indexes of the data on storage (meaning: the type of data files being backed up is inconsequential to the DDB, just the volume/amount of data files/folders/objects to track causes it to grow). I know this will use up storage space, and likely little/no compression will be occur, but maybe the image files are all “similar” would we get some block level dedup on them.
Anyway; I’m wondering if TB’s of likely unique image files are something where one would want to do a setup that was very special, or if I just hook this up to our standard DDB enabled storage policies, if the DDB size will just handle it and not balloon in size or responsiveness. Of if there is a rule of thumb to use to precalculate something like this and impact it could have to the DDB before we back it up (I know storage space and licensing will be impacted, and can simply estimate “if we back up 10 TB, it can be 10 TB of storage or licensing needed before we back this up)