Forum ©XSIBackup: ©VMWare ©ESXi Backup Software

In my case, I cannot afford two reposistories because I don't have that much space on my backup disks.
The reason is, that I chose a combination of data backups, and VM backups.

But that doesn't mean that I don't want to keep more than one snapshot. Because of data deduplication, I can keep
e.g. 5 daily snapshot, without needing 5 x the space. I can be relatively sure that it will fit, because I can monitor the
system, make an avarage of how much the system grows in one day, and add plenty headroom to that.

So I would like to plead that there is a use case for this functionality. And I wouldn't mind if the backup would
take 50% more time, if I would be sure it would fit.

I have read your arguments above. But I'm not sure I agree with all of them.

> 1 - Purging orphaned blocks would be time consuming

When I take a backup of my VM with XSItools, it takes roughly 8 hours,
even if most of the data is already there. Purging the orphaned blocks with this script
takes maybe half an hour. Of course with smaller block sizes, it might take longer.

> 2 - Deleting the wrong ones would be desastrous

Is it hard to make sure you don't?

> 3 - The space you are going to save by purging a well populated repo is insignificant, as most blocks will be shared

The space used only depends on how long you keep using the same repository.

Right now, the only way to make space is deleting every data block in the repository,
and start completely from scratch. Wouldn't it be at least possible to move the blocks
from one repo to the other? If you are worried about bad blocks, you can always check
the repository.