Large Incrementals with backup copy

[shaun.stull]

We've just started using cloud connect with a provider and seeded our backups using backup copy jobs. There was about a week and a half gap between when the data was written to the disks to when the provider finished loading the seed data on their side. We've noticed our first backup copy incremental run seems excessively large in comparison to the regular incremental jobs we run on prem. One of the jobs that we fired off first thing with an incremental was one that has little to no changes going on with it. The incremental ended up being more than half the size of the initial full(336GB incremental, 591GB full). Are we doing something wrong here or is this what we can expect with backup copies?

Our regular backup jobs are all forever incremental with synthetic fulls being created weekly.

[Shestakov]

Hello Shaun and welcome to the community!
Increment size indeed looks big, but considering 10+ days between job runs, half of VM could change. Is that SQL or Exchange server?
Have you run the job for the third time?
Thanks!

[Vitaliy S.]

Nikita is spot on. On a side note, if you want to reduce the amount of data transferred to the cloud repository, you can consider using WAN accelerators for the backup copy job.

[shaun.stull]

Thanks for the quick response! It is a SQL server but it is not getting touched. This server is online, but is more or less not in use. I ran another incremental on it this morning and it was much smaller, around 40GB. Will the WAN accelerator also reduce the storage footprint in the cloud repository for future jobs? Or is it just compressed before transit/decompressed on arrival?

[Vitaliy S.]

WAN will just reduce the amount of data that has to be transferred, it will not reduce the size of the actual backup file.

[Shestakov]

I ran another incremental on it this morning and it was much smaller, around 40GB.

Nice. Probably time interval between job runs was the answer.
If you are interested, there is a related discussion about big incrementals on "static" servers.
Thanks!