Snapshots are an important part of your Filespace's business continuity and data integrity.  Each Filespace starts with a default snapshot schedule.  Admins can modify this schedule to suit the team's data retention needs, but it is also important to understand how different retention periods impact your billing.

To understand how snapshots impact billing, let's first examine the two storage numbers displayed on the LucidLink Application and web portal.  File system size is the total size of your files as measured by your operating system.  Used storage is the total size of data under LucidLink management including snapshots.  Why might these two numbers be different?  Let's explore below.

The Filespace displayed above currently has 3.1TB of file system size and used storage.  If a user were to delete 100GB of data, the file system size would drop to 3.0TB, but the used storage would stay at 3.1TB.  This is because the 100GB will be protected from being truly deleted until any snapshots protecting that data have expired.  In the default schedule this would be 4 weeks, but you would need to check your Filespace's snapshot schedule to confirm your settings.  After the retention period has expired, that 100GB would be permanently deleted bringing the used storage down accordingly.

If you find that the difference between your file system size and used storage is higher than you want, an admin user can modify the snapshot schedule to shorten the retention period, and to account for temporary fluctuations, may even manually delete some of the retained snapshots.  Please see the article on snapshot schedules and snapshot deletion to learn more.