does veeamzip backup only used space inside a VM?

[techresultsforyou]

I've searched this forum and not found an answer to this question. I've deleted about 300GB of old files from within a Windows 2012 virtual machine running on an ESXi 6 host. If I run a VeeamZip will it only backup the portion of the VM that has files in it or will it backup the space previously occupied by the deleted data?

I believe that vSphere/ESXi will not show the available space as increasing after I do this delete until a certain process is followed (I think running the Mark Russinovich sdelete utility inside the VM and then shutting down the VM and running vmkfstools to reclaim the space in ESXi is required to fully reclaim the space in ESXi). Since Veeam has data compression built in, I wonder if it will backup only the space occupied by files inside the VM? I really don't want to follow all the steps to recover the space in ESXi and have to take the VM down if I don't have to - I'm hoping Veeam doesn't care whether ESXi sees the freed up space or not and is smart enough to backup just the used space inside the VM.

In case you are wondering, I have never run a VeeamZip on this VM and I don't really want to run 2 VeeamZips (before and after the delete) just so I can compare the size of the VeeamZip to answer this question.

Thanks in advance for any help offered.

[foggy]

Hi, dirty blocks should be skipped, thanks to BitLooker functionality.

[techresultsforyou]

Thanks, foggy. I don't see that settings dialog you showed in your link in my version - I wonder if those settings are not available in the free version of Veeam?

[foggy]

Yep, this is not configured in the free version, however, should work by default, I believe.