How to manage the backup storage growth¶
According to the Afi pricing model, the service cost depends on two main factors: the number of active protected resources (users, virtual machines, etc.) and the amount of storage occupied by backups. Under standard pricing terms, each resource license grants a certain amount of backup storage space which, in a typical case, is enough to cover the backup storage without a necessity to purchase additional licensed storage. However, as backup storage grows over time, you may eventually need to either purchase additional storage licenses or reduce the backup storage occupied by the tenant.
Afi provides multiple settings and features that help you control how much backup storage your tenant uses, reduce storage consumption if needed, and limit future growth. These features include retention and archiving settings as well as exclusion rules.
Estimate the initial backup storage usage¶
To determine your infrastructure size and estimate your initial backup storage requirements, you can follow these guides:
Backup storage growth¶
Afi calculates backup storage usage as the total size of all item versions in all historical backup snapshots stored by the service, including items that have been deleted or overwritten on the provider side (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, etc.). Consequently, your backup storage usage is expected to grow over time, even if you keep the same number of resources (users, drives, sites, etc.) protected.
Except for the initial snapshot, Afi backup snapshots are forever incremental and synchronize only the changes that occurred since the previous backup. As a result, each incremental backup typically adds only a small amount of new data.
To monitor when the backup storage usage is approaching the licensed threshold and avoid exceeding the licensed backup storage quota, you can configure licensing notification recipients on the Configuration → Notifications tab as described here.
To analyze backup storage consumption and identify which backups occupy the most space in an Afi tenant, you can download a list of all resources in the tenant and their backup storage sizes on the Service → Settings → Info tab in the Afi portal (see the Download CSV button).
Data retention and archiving settings¶
Data retention and archiving rules are configured as a part of backup SLA policy settings and are applied to the resources protected with the corresponding backup SLA policies.

Data retention¶
Data retention rules specify how long different kinds of data should be stored, as well as how and when data is cleaned up after the retention period ends.
To free up backup storage and limit the future backup storage growth, we recommend configuring either backup version or GFS retention rules to delete old snapshots together with items/item versions which are no longer visible in the retained backup snapshots as described here. In practice, GFS retention rules can help free up more storage while still preserving a longer backup history, compared to backup version retention rules.
Data archiving¶
Archiving rules let you define how long to retain backups for resources after they become archived. Once the archiving period ends, the backup is permanently deleted along with all associated snapshots.
For example, you can configure archiving rules to keep backups for deleted or suspended users for one year before removing them.
Exclusion rules¶
Afi also allows you to configure exclusion rules for labels/folders in Gmail and Exchange, as well as for certain file extensions in Google Drive, OneDrive, and SharePoint. Excluding large or unnecessary items, such as video recordings, images, and binary files, can help reduce your overall backup storage footprint and slow down storage growth.
You can learn more about exclusion rules in these articles:

Backup deletion¶
You can also delete an entire backup (along with all its historical snapshots) to free up the storage used by that backup. To do this, open the browse view for the backup you want to delete, click the trash icon in the top-right corner of the screen, and confirm the deletion.
For security reasons, backup deletions are delayed and are performed in 7 days after being scheduled. The backup storage usage for the tenant is adjusted within the 24 hours after the data is deleted.

If you need to remove a large number of backups that your organization no longer requires, you can use Afi public API to delete them programmatically.