Size of incremental Backup

[Keyser]

Hi Veeam

I just love endpoint backup - what a great product!!

I have no idea how you actually track the filesystem changes that leads to the incremental backup, but I would like to hear if there's any "optimizations" that can be done on my behalf to minimize the backup size?

The reason i'm asking is that i'm getting fairly large incremental backup file sizes. As an example:

If i do a backup on my laptop, and afterwards shut down the machine with no changes or launched apps, then booting my machine - still no launched apps or services - and starting a new backup, i'll get an incremental backup size in the 2 - 4Gb range. Now it's not much in terms of storage space so that's not my concern, but it does take quite a while to create the backup, and my laptop are connected to a fairly slow wifi on which 2-3Gb takes quite some time to transfer.

I know Windows does not actually change 4 - 5Gb data (2-3Gb after compression) on disk for a simple reboot, so I was thinking maybe I could change the size of blocks Veeam tracks or something like that?

[Dima P.]

Hi Keyser,
Thanks, glad you enjoy using Veeam Endpoint Backup!

so I was thinking maybe I could change the size of blocks Veeam tracks or something like that?

The change tracking happens on the NTFS level, so the size of the incremental backup fully relies on the file change rate, so, frankly speaking, not much you can do about it. First, you could exclude some folders with files that are changing frequently.

Second option (my favorite)would be to create entire PC standalone full backup. Then configure the regular “rotated” backup including the data volumes only and excluding the OS folders. Whenever you need a Bare Metal Recovery you can use the entire PC standalone full backup and then file level restore the missing files.

The last but not the least – check if scheduled defrag is enabled for the selected volumes, it should be by default anyway for non-server operating systems (does not refer to SSD drives).

[kacsp]

Hi, I'm having the same problem here. My setup is that I'm using EndPoint Backup to take a copy of a number of folders on a physical server which contain Veeam VBK files, and these VBKs are actively updated overnight by their respective backup jobs. The total data is 1.5TB and EndPoint copies this to a 2TB SAN disk (I can't go bigger than this for infrastructure reasons). The problem is that running EndPoint incremental backups after the initial full backup seems to be impossible, even with 500GB free on the SAN volume, and nowhere near this amount of VM changes having being written to the VBKs overnight. Because all the VBKs are updated each night, EndPoint tries to copy each full VBK for each Backup Job over the next day, and on a 2TB volume there just isn't the room. Am I correct in thinking this is what's happening?

Thanks...

[Vitaliy S.]

Because all the VBKs are updated each night, EndPoint tries to copy each full VBK for each Backup Job over the next day, and on a 2TB volume there just isn't the room. Am I correct in thinking this is what's happening?

Yes, that's correct. Changing tracking is currently based on file modification date, so every time you modify VBK file it gets copied as new data.

[kacsp]

OK, thanks for that...

[Dima P.]

EndPoint tries to copy each full VBK for each Backup Job over the next day

Which is strange as backup location should be excluded by default from the backup source. Have you noticed any errors or warnings noted during the backup process?