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I’ve inherited commvault from our previous admin. They’ve done a pretty decent job about documenting some items but it hasn’t been updated in years. 

 

We’ve been playing cat and mouse with backups and dealing with upper management not wanting to purchase more storage, and they want an easy answer on what is eating up all of our storage, what's being backed up, what's not, and why we would need a 500k storage upgrade. And obviously licensing is an issue as well. I want to also preface this with our company has finally drawn up a retention policy so were not keeping junk that's over 10 years old anymore. 

We handle sensitive information as a government contractor, so all of our storage is on prem. No cloud instances. I have 3 storage pools and a disaster recovery site in another state. To give a basic overview of what I’m working with. 

This is my dashboard. 

My gripes aside it’s now my responsibility to make sense of everything in commvault to put into a powerpoint presentation a 10 year old that makes purchasing decisions can understand. 

 

Anyway I’ll cut to my questions. 

 

The storage policies down this list on the left, I’m still trying to familiarize myself with these icons and what they all mean. I have a primary storage policy, and primary_old storage policy. And we have tape policies. (we don’t use any tape stuff anymore it was ripped out a few years ago)

I imagine that there are sub policies active under both of these storage policies and certain things that were backed up in primary_old is not backed up in primary if I comb through it. 

Now I imagine in the second screenshot if there is no checkmark in status, and dedup the policies are not active and being used.

Q: If I have a stale storage policy that is not active will deleting it reclaim space? 

Q: What are the repercussions I should anticipate deleting stale storage policies that show they’re hosting data?

  • Q: If I have a storage policy that is essentially a copy (primary and old_primary for example) is that data being written twice? I want to believe I read a thread on here somewhere that said that isn’t the case. 
  • Q: If that is the case. If these I delete “old_primary” will the files that were selected to back up on both jobs disappear or just the ones associated with old_primary” I hope that makes sense? 

I’ve seen plenty of these posts, so I’m sorry for adding a host of random questions trying to make sense of commvault. 

Take a look at the media forecast report and you should get a better idea why data is there and what criteria needs to be met for the data to age off.

Make sure you select only the policy copies you need to see as it queries all the jobs and the more you add the longer it will run and the bigger the report. 
 

Deleting a storage policy copy will reclaim space, but you want to make sure there isn’t something like an aux copy dependent on it or that still needs to copy date.

You might also want to take a look here: https://ea.commvault.com/Catalog/Course?group=575&course=1450

Q: If I have a stale storage policy that is not active will deleting it reclaim space? 

Yes when deleting a storage policy (copy) data will be pruned, but depending on your setup the gain can be minimal if data is part of a global ddb. If the primary blocks aren't pruned you will only delete secondary blocks (pointers).

Q: What are the repercussions I should anticipate deleting stale storage policies that show they’re hosting data?

You won't be able to recover that data anymore.

Q: If I have a storage policy that is essentially a copy (primary and old_primary for example) is that data being written twice? I want to believe I read a thread on here somewhere that said that isn’t the case. 

Primary should perform all data intake l, depending on the retention it will contain x cycles of data. The old_primary van still receive data if it is a secondary copy, if it is disabled the it will not gain new data. In your case it's disabled.

Q: If that is the case. If these I delete “old_primary” will the files that were selected to back up on both jobs disappear or just the ones associated with old_primary” I hope that makes sense? 

Only the copy deleted will be involved in deletion of data, assuming that all data has been auxiliary copied to other storage policy copies if needed/configured.

Appreciate the responses. I know I initially generated some reports and it was just way too much data to parse through. 

I seriously suggest spending some money to get someone in there that knows that they are doing.

Those screenshots are alarming.

 

at the very least have someone go through your retention settings.

 

Getting advice is all well and good as someone who is familiar with the product but it seems you have been dropped into a dire situation. 

Given the free space allocation and job numbers I have a sneaking suspicion that its easier to solve your problem with a knowledgeable person than with throwing 500K of hardware at it, that may not solve anything.

 

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