Veeam Backup Size

[M1k3]

Hi,

I wondered if anyone could clarify how the sizing works for backups of VM's using the free Veeam B&R edition. I have a few VM's with fixed disks which amount to 1tb, currently these are all blank VM's with only the OS installed but the disks take up 1tb space on the host due to being fixed disks. I have ran a test Veeam backup and the backup size is only 30Gb, does Veeam only look at the used space on the virtual disk? It just seemed extremely low.

I was expecting a 1tb backup size. If Veeam only looks at the actual used space of the Virtual disk does this effect doing a full restore of a VM?

Thanks

[PetrM]

Hello,

The unused space is considered as an array of "sparse" blocks and there is no point to process such blocks, it's enough to know how many "sparse" blocks exist in the virtual disk and just add this information into the backup file metadata. The state of the restored virtual disk will be identical to the state of the production one. But I'm not sure that I've got what you mean by "It just seemed extremely low"? Could you please elaborate a bit more on it?

Thanks!