How much change is backed up on Full backup days?

[AdrianHinton]

Hi,

On any job that is not a full backup, you can easily see how much change is read and transferred. But on a full backup day, these figures are huge and represent the entire VM. For reporting purposes, how am I supposed to see how much change was actually detected and backed up during a full backup run?

[Gostev]

Hi

Are you using Active or Synthetic full?

Thanks.

[AdrianHinton]

I'm using active full.

[foggy]

Adrian, active full reads and transfers the entire VM, creating brand new full backup file. So there's no way to determine the amount of changes occurred since the previous job run.

[AdrianHinton]

Hi Foggy. Considering that the copy job associated with each backup will only transfer the change, can this be a feature request to be able to see how much of that change is marked for transfer? These active full days absolutely skew historical reporting data and for people like me who need to see what will be transferred and how much change is actually backed up, this is very important.

Are there any properties accessible via powershell that might indicate the amount of change either using the VeeamPsSnapin or VMWare cmdlets? Maybe querying some CBT properties or directly accessing VADP logs or properties?

[veremin]

What about using Veeam ONE? It has two reports that might be useful for you. Using VM write activity, first report estimates changes, the second one will provide information regarding historical VM changes for the backup job. As to precise data, the following operations are still needed: the snapshot creation, getting CBT ID and matching that to the existing data blocks on the VM disk. Thanks.

[Vitaliy S.]

can this be a feature request to be able to see how much of that change is marked for transfer? These active full days absolutely skew historical reporting data and for people like me who need to see what will be transferred and how much change is actually backed up, this is very important.

I'm still a bit confused about this request, as active full transfers the entire VM image and it does not matter what data was previously stored in the restore points of the VM.

[foggy]

...and for people like me who need to see what will be transferred and how much change is actually backed up, this is very important.

You can use some historical average change rate for a rough estimation. Btw, how do you use this information, do you perform any actions based on it (for example, when you see huge amount of changes backed up some day)?