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How to reduce storage space used by Shadow Copy on SBS 2011?

Hello,

We have a client whose server has a 1.7 TB RAID 5 array that houses all of the data for their SBS 2011 server. We have VSS running on it because it works well for doing quick data recovery whenever a user accidentally deletes a file (which happens alot). The problem is that currently its taking up about 45 percent of the drive in windows, and it sucks up more and more each day. In a month or two the drive will be completely filled up if it stays with its current rate of growth, possibly less as I've noticed the rate has increased a bit. I don't want to disable Shadow Copy, just reduce the amount of storage it uses. I've listed the things I've tried below. As a side note the storage cap was set at 88 gigs, but for some reason its way over that, sitting at around 835 gigs currently (up 15 gigs from yesterday)

Deleting some of the older shadow copies - didn't affect storage usage
Set storage cap to 1 gig - didn't affect storage usage (returned to 10 percent after trying)
Used command line tool to delete some more of the shadow copies - didn't affect storage usage
Disabled Shadow copy completely (which according to windows deletes all the shadow copies) and re-enabled - didn't affect storage usage

I'll continue googling to see what I can find, but any help would be greatly appreciated.

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Vishalnarse

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ctagle

ASKER

While that does tell me how to allocate storage for future applications it unfortunately doesn't address my current problem. But I think the problem may have resolved itself as after rebooting the server it cleared out all of those old shadow copies. But I would like to know what can be done to prevent this from happening in the future. Despite the cap of about 10 percent of the hard drive space it went far beyond that and utilized almost half of the drive, are there any suggestions on how to mitigate this, or am I just going to have to bust out partition magic and split the drive?

ctagle

ASKER

doesn't solve the existing problem but it does provide strategies for the future.