Contracted (purchased) protected space

Contracted (purchased) protected space is the size of data purchased to be protected. You can find this in your order documentation.

Important

Don’t confuse with the protected space.

Fair Use Policy

For a single backup job of a client, the protected space will be larger than the space used on disk on the secondary (cloud) CFA. Once versioning comes into play (scheduled backups are running), this will change, and the actual used space will be larger than the protected space.

For the regular Infrascale Disaster Recovery, the Fair Use Policy allows for the actual used space on the secondary (cloud) CFA to be as much as 3 times the contracted protected space.

For the Infrascale Disaster Recovery Local, the Fair Use Policy allows for the actual used space on the secondary (cloud) CFA to be as much as 2 times the contracted protected space.

Learn more about the Infrascale Disaster Recovery offerings.

Once the Fair Use limit is nearly reached or is reached, you have the option to either reduce the actual used space by using the retention policy to remove some versions, or to increase your contracted protected space so the contracted protected space is greater than or equal to 1/3 (1/2 for Infrascale Disaster Recovery Local) your actual space usage.

With no retention policies, 80% of customers are within the Fair Use Policy.

With retention policies enabled, 99% of customers are within the Fair Use Policy.

Overages and billing

An overage occurs when the amount of actual protected space (whether on the primary or secondary appliance) is larger than the contracted protected space.

This can happen when the retention policies on the primary CFA versus a secondary (cloud) CFA are different, i.e. keeping more jobs on the secondary than on the primary. In this case, you have to either upgrade your subscription by increasing the amount of the contracted protected space, or to reduce the actual protected space being used.

Protected space

Protected space is the size of the total protected data on all clients prior to compression and deduplication.

Learn more about the protected space and how to reduce it.

Important

Don’t confuse with the contracted protected space.

Retention Policies

Backups can be configured to daily, weekly and monthly rollups, whereas previously all restore points were preserved. For customers who perform frequent backups, this requires far less space on the CFA and prevents the need to replace over-filled hardware. In addition, this allows customers to configure long-term retention to optimize cost/benefit requirements.

Learn more about the retention settings on the CFA.

Used on disk

Used on disk is the actual space used on the CFA after the backup data compression and deduplication. It includes all versions of the backup jobs.

On the primary CFA, this should be managed to ensure there’s adequate disk space to run the system.

On the secondary (cloud) CFA, space used on disk is governed by our Fair Use Policy.