Shadows

A shadow is a guest’s replicated copy on the recovery side of a pair — a qcow2 file, or a native ZFS/LVM volume, depending on the storage you chose. The Shadows page shows every shadow ProxDR can find on the recovery side and classifies each one:

• Active — part of a live replication (a protected guest points at it).
• Orphan — sitting in storage with nothing referencing it: a guest you stopped protecting, a leftover from a moved or re-seeded shadow, or a shadow from a pair that no longer exists.

For each shadow you see its backend (qcow2 file or volume), storage location, size, age, and the owning pair.

Scanning

A background scan sweeps the recovery storages periodically and reclassifies every shadow. You can also trigger a scan on demand. The page shows the current scan status (including what it’s scanning right now), a history of past scans, and lets you filter to just active or just orphaned shadows.

Shadows physically exist only on the recovery side of a pair, so from a source site the Shadows page reaches across the encrypted peer link to show the replicas held at the recovery site — you get one view of every replica across both sites.

Reclaiming space from orphans

Orphaned shadows still consume storage. Delete an orphan straight from the page to free its space — ProxDR removes the underlying qcow2 files or frees the ZFS/LVM volume.

Active shadows can’t be deleted here. The delete is re-verified against a fresh scan and refused for anything a live replication still uses, so you can never cut a protected guest’s recovery copy out from under it.