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Managing API Consumption for Dynamics Backups
Admins users can set limits for API consumption, for files and attachments downloaded via the REST API, in the Options menu.
Limit
Admins should first verify the API usage in their Dynamics environment. Log in to your Power Platform admin center (https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/) and navigate to Dataverse in Analytics.
These screens will help you understand the number of APIs your organization uses, your daily limits, as well as your file storage user and table/entity usage. These numbers will be used to decide on your API limit strategy.
Microsoft Dynamics governs the total number of REST APIs used per rolling 24-hour period. Typically, there are other apps that utilize some of that API bank, along with the Own application.
Controlling the Rate of Download for Files & Attachments
The API Consumption limits the number of file/attachments that can be downloaded per day for various Tables. This controls the rate of file and attachment downloads.
Our application intelligently separates the download of data tables from the file/attachment tables during a given backup. Since files & attachments only need to be downloaded once (unless changed), the backup service checks for the difference between files and new/changed files in your environment. This includes items such as Attachments, Knowledge Articles, Workflows, Content Notes, Content Versions, Documents, etc.
The default API consumption for downloading the file/attachment tables is 5,000 API calls, which can be increased up to 600,000 (note: each file consumes 1 REST API call). This means that with a 600,000 limit, every backup will attempt to use up to 600,000 API calls to download 600,000 potential records. This will continue for each backup until it finishes downloading all of the file/attachment tables.
Example
If an org contains about 1,400,000 files to download and the API limit is 600,000 - it will take approximately three backups for all the files to download. Warnings for file download limits will display until all of the file and attachment tables are fully downloaded.
The warnings for file download limits will display in the OB platform, until all of the files/attachments have been fully downloaded.
Another item that also influences the overall backup time, is the API limit variant. The bigger the API Limits number is, the longer it would take to complete the full backup.
To get a balance between reaching full files coverage, and having backups that take less than 24 hours to complete (daily SLA), we recommend starting with an API Limit of 25,000, and then increasing or decreasing the limit, according to your needs.
