RAID Corruption on Backup Volume

I’m trying to get to the bottom of what I suspect is corruption of the Backup volume due to RAID issues over Christmas.

I’m running v.2.4.13 on Windows Server 2019. The Backup volume is NTFS. The machine is a VM on ESXi. The RAID array was on the host rather than something nasty within the VM.

I am resigned to the fact that data backed up before Christmas is partly/completely corrupt.
The volume keeps running out of space even though it’s backing up nowhere near enough data to justify this and the Storage Usage on the Statistics page shows a total of 861Gb but the disk shows 1.3Tb used. I assume UrBackup can’t read the corrupt files so possibly can’t account for them or something. I decided to try to delete pre-christmas backups from the Backups page of the web interface but it gets stuck on some of them… the progress bar runs the full width of the window, slowly and then becomes unresponsive.

I noticed in another topic mention of a verify-hashes command but not sure it exists on a Windows install?

Are there any other suggestions? Can I maybe manually delete old data from the disk (going back to recent full backups perhaps) and then repair the DB or something?

Any suggestions gratefully received.

First off how much actual free space to you have available on the NTFS volume? I think that number is important to know about space issues.

If you are low on free space, I recommend tuning on De-duplication on your drive. In my situation, urBackup says I have 489GB of backups, but actual space consumed on the NTFS drvie is 178GB. urBackup and Windows De-duplication use different methods to save space and the complement each other.

If you do use Windows de-duplication, give the system a week to really work through the data.

Thank you for the reply smcclos.
Apologies for missing the info out… the drive is 1.3Tb. In other words, it’s currently full. (Well, 30Gb free - nothing in the great scheme of things)
I have previously grown the drive to give it 10% free space to work with but it grows to full again pretty quickly (and it’s definitely not backing up (or retaining) enough data to justify it.
I am installing Windows De-Dupe now and will consider enabling it. Thank you for this recommendation.

De-Dupe now enabled. Configured for ‘General Purpose File Server’. It will be interesting to see what effect this has on used space… but it’s not going to address my issue.
Any further thoughts?

Two things:

  1. For NTFS volumes, CHKDSK /F is the official way to repair filesystem corruption.
  2. To reduce the space used by UrBackup, look at Settings: General: Server and at the bottom of the page Global soft filesystem quota. Set that value to something like 80% or even 50% for testing to cut down on the number of additional backups retained. After that, reducing the Minimal number of (incremental or full) file backups or image backups on their respective pages will allow UrBackup to discard old data more quickly. If you don’t have a lot of changes between backups then this will not help as much.

Did Windows De-Dupe do anything to the free space of the drive?

Also I forgot this before, Your urBackup server is virtual, so couldn’t you just expand the drive to give yourself more space to work with?