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Question

One Off Backups and Licence Usage

  • April 2, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 8 views
I
Novice
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Hi all.

We’ve been using our Commvault setup to take one off NDMP backups of critical research data from our central storage, then copying to two tapes, all that good stuff.  As these are a one-off backup, I’ve been disabling the client activity and removing the licence afterwards, as they’ll only be needed for a potential restore down the line (retention is a minimum of 5 years).

I’ve noticed that this doesn’t count towards licence usage, which in essence means that we can do as many “archives” as we have storage for, as long as we have the sufficient licence headroom for the initial one off backup.

My worry is this would be seen as circumventing licence costs, and against the fair usage idea, and if we were ever audited it would result in additional charges.  

I should add we’re not a massive setup, 1000 VMs and ~250TB of capacity.  The archives in total would be 10s of TB, maybe ranging into 100s.

Anybody got any relevant info or thoughts?

TIA

Ian

1 reply

Paul G
Apprentice
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  • Paul GApprentice
  • Apprentice
  • April 2, 2026

Hi ​@Ian Duggan,

Commvault has always worked like that. Once you have backed up data through a client it will be available for recovery as long as you have the data in storage, even if the data is no longer actively being backed up. Releasing the license from the client (or even disabling the backup activity on a subclient) will drop it out of the license count.

 Commvault should not penalize you when they see this as they have always counted licenses this way. I have used a similar way of storing one-time backups and even "dirtier” ways of storing data for a long time in Commvault without license cost. Changing this would also cause issues for a lot of customers that have long retention on data that is migrated from server to server (data like Exchange databases) as they would effectively pay double for the retention of that data.

Be aware that if you get new license forms that these rules might change as this has happened for MS365 backups in the past. However, I don't expect that to happen for NDMP backup as they mainly focus on newer ways of backing up data or data types when it comes to license changes.

So yes, this means you can potentially have many "archives” within Commvault like this but it is also a lot of work. Commvault is more focused on active backup on active systems.

Kind regards,

Paul

 

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