Minimal copy follow up.

I started a case with the minimal copy issue as stated earlier. About a week later after some rather heated discussion with the support a bit over 3GB of each instance was removed.

It was at times interesting to say the least when talking to the support crew. That being said, I have no grudge whatsoever with the people I was talking to since it wasn't their job that I was debating but rather the back end.

The first answer I got was that it was data from the instance I was copying to, since that wasn't empty when I started, there wasn't any real explanaition to why I couldn't access any of that data to remove it though.

Answer number two was that it was metadata and customizations, when I asked why the development instance was a mere 1.3GB that didn't really give any answers either. I think that the 1.3GB is a bit on the heavy side too considering that a somewhat filled Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement 8.2 on premise database is around 0.8GB so I was asking how come an "empty" instance is almost twice the size of an on prem one too. After an hour long screen sharing session where I did a reset of the test instance before I did a new minimal copy from production which gave the same result as before, which I assume removed the idea that it was old data taking up the space, the case was still open.

At this time the power platform admin center wasn't available any longer for this instance, and I don't think it's back up yet either so I couldn't see which tables were creating the most impact any longer. the Dynamics admin center told me that the size was still on the large side though.

After little more than a week the size was considerably smaller, a little over 3GB per instance was shaved and the case was closed. I didn't get any info on what data was removed more than that scripts had been run on the backend to recalculate the size of the instances.

The moral of this is that it's a good idea to have a look at your instances after a minimal copy to see if they are around the 1GB mark unless you have a shitload of customizations of course. Sometimes the answers given by the support team isn't correct unfortunately and it helps having had a look at how the databases behave. The thing that annoys me most in all of this is that I got answers two times that didn't really told the truth and that Microsoft charges by the GB, in this case 6 of them, which is just air.

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