Minimal copy of instance and what the result is.

We've been working a bit with migration the past couple of weeks and in this job we've done a few instance copies using the "Minimal Copy Instance" from the Administration center. This resulted in a sandbox instance with 4.5 GB of data which seemed sort of funny.

What we were doing is to copy the production instance to a sandbox dito with the minimal copy instance option from the Administration center. According to the documentation from Microsoft found at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-engagement/admin/copy-instance  the entities that are copied are the following:

• BusinessUnit
• ConnectionRole
• Currency
• DuplicateRule
• DuplicateRuleCondition
• EmailServerProfile
• FieldPermission
• FieldSecurityProfile
• ImportMap
• InternalAddress
• Mailbox
• Organization
• Position
• Report
• Resource
• ResourceGroup
• Role
• RollupField
• SavedQuery
• SLAKPIInstance
• Solution
• Subject
• Team
• TeamTemplate
• Template
• SystemUser

Now, I had a look at the storage report of the instances and we have three of those, one development, one test and one production. These are 1.5GB, 4.5GB and 8.5GB which is sort of interesting since the test one should be completely empty of data.

Digging deeper into this I had a look at what data is present and there's quite a lot of Audit logs according to the admin center, 850 MB of those, but when I look at the Audit logs in the instance, there's 250MB that I can find. Looking at the Entity list, Audit logs aren't present there making it even more confusing.

The top three biggest tables are contoso_paymentBase, ContactBase and AuditBase (contoso_paymentBase is called something else really, but it's a custom entity, or the "contoso_payment" is a custom entity at least). Now, these tables should be the SQL tables of the entities "contoso_payment", "Contact" and "Audit", but how can they be so large considering there are NO records in the first two and yes, 250 MB in the Audit table which I can see, but not 800 MB.

I started a support case with Microsoft in this matter at the first contact I was told that I should do a reset of the instance, which isn't really what I want since I want the metadata presented above plus all customizations, Microsoft was going to investigate and come back to me.

Rickard Norström
Developer at CRM-Konsulterna
www.crmkonsulterna.se