If you find one of your clients is exceeding the storage capacity of their backup package or billing plan, you may want to reduce their usage to avoid incurring overage charges or prevent a Local Vault folder from filling up. This article will describe the most common ways for reducing usage.
Solution
Adjust Revision Rules
Generally speaking, the main factor driving usage growth is the archiving rule used by backup sets. Lowering the retention period for backup sets is the first thing you should try doing to reduce your data usage. Edit a backup set and skip to the Settings page to modify the archiving rule. Since backup sets of different types use different archiving rules, consult this article for an explanation of how those work for their respective backup set types.
When changing the archiving rules to reduce usage, it is important to mention those rules will not take effect until another backup is run. This is why, in cases where the drive or device housing your Local Vault is completely full, you will need to manually delete data first to get the chance for new archiving rules to work.
Stray Files
Another big contributor to usage growth is stray files. Stray files are a byproduct of having a File and Folder backup set; files that were backed up at one time are moved, renamed, or deleted and become stray. For most people, the default policy is to keep stray files indefinitely, which translates to a source of usage which is never trimmed, purged, or capped. If you have a File and Folder backup set which is growing steadily in size, even after the initial full backup, the likely reason is the accumulation of stray files. Stray files can be removed either by manually deleting them or by setting up a retention rule for stray files.