Large incremental files

[KasterBlaster]

I know a lot has already been written about this topic, but I wonder if anyone could advise me.One of the virtual machines that I backup, after the incremental backup is completed, has the following report:
Size:250GB
Read:35.2GB
Transffered:21.2GB
Dedupe:1.2x
Compression:2.0x
incremental backups vary about size between 22-32GB, VM is Windows Server 2012R2 and I have active Revit server 2018 installed on it which is accessed by 15 clients, their changes to the central revit models are not of such a character as to generate such large incremental backups.AV is off, disk is not fragmented, defrag is scheduled, no SQL server.

[Egor Yakovlev]

Hi Sasa,
You can try to localize the problem:
- on Friday evening, shut down Revit service(to avoid scheduled tasks like daily index rebuild, DB maintenance or something like that) and see if increments on Saturday and Sunday yield same data growth.
- Veeam One has awesome "VM Change Rate Estimation" report with [Per Hour] setting. It will show VHDX change rates \ spikes during selected period of time. There is a free trial on our website to get.
- same as above but result driven: if you have some spare space on Repository, schedule backup job to run every hour. That might help localizing a "spike" if it happens - incremental backups size will show when most data growth happens during the day.
- some time before scheduled backup job triggers, go File Explorer and under search put "datemodified:today". That might show some guides\unexpected places with changed objects.
- note that by default Veeam reads disk chunks of 1MB, that is if block of data has 3KB change(small file changes in guest OS), Veeam will still read whole 1MB off of it's parent VHDX.
Hope that helps!

[KasterBlaster]

Well, thank you on quick response and useful advices, after a bit of research I think the problem is with revit caching.How could i exclude the directory containing revit's cache?

[Egor Yakovlev]

You can use File Exclusions under Job Settings for it.
Note, that it might affect job speed due to additional file-tracking operations.
/Cheers!

[KasterBlaster]

Thank You, but I have one problem, I have 3 VMs in one backup job, when trying procedure: VM Guest OS File Exclusion, I only get 4 tabs:general,sql,oracle, scripts.What Im doing wrong?

[wishr]

Hello,

File exclusions are only available in the Enterprise and Enterprise+ editions. Please refer to the editions comparison for more info. What edition do you have?

Thanks

[KasterBlaster]

Oh well, Im new to Veeam, I have free version Veeam Backup & Replication, did not know that.

[wishr]

Is there a chance to move the Revit's cache to another VM disk? This would allow you to exclude the whole VM disk from the backup.

[KasterBlaster]

Good idea, thank you, though I must first look at how the revit server will behave in this case.

[wishr]

Welcome. I suggest checking if there is an official Revit's guide, statement or documentation covering this aspect.