restoring / file sizes

[RobertKO]

Hi,

I backed up a big 3 TB vmware guest (from a ESXi host) with nearly no content in it. So it was all in all a 2.5 GB file.

I then tried to restore it on a different hardware/system (VMware Workstation).

1) is there a way that the vmware configuration files also get backed up?
I don't mind if I have to manually add a new vmware guest when restoring and then have to add the restored .vmdk files there.
I am just asking, maybe I am missing something.

2) file sizes
this is confusing me: on the ESXi host the .vmdk file takes 3TB space on the filesystem.
But now when I restored the .vmdk on my Vmware Workstation (under Windows) I get a file with these properties:
- size on disk: 7,16GB
- size: 3 TB
I do understand that the 7,16 GB is the uncompressed data of the restored .vmdk, but what happened exactly?
Did veeam restore the .vmdk without having the disk space pre-allocated? this would be perfectly fine. Can this behaviour be changed also?
I booted the vmware guest up and all works, great !

3) how does Veeam compress/dedupe? to such a small file size?
Does Veeam actually only copy the blocks with content into the backup file? Not copying the empty/deleted blocks?
This is so awesome!
I used to run another product for backing up my vmware hosts (HP VME explorer). There it would just have copied over a full 3TB file 1:1 to the destination.
And with veeam I got a perfect small 2.5GB file. GREAT!

[HannesK]

Hello,
1) they are included in the backup. No extra configuration needed.

2) you can choose thin / thick provisioning during restore. That's what happend

3) it depends on the content. I don't know what data you backed up, but as the restore worked you obviously did not miss anything. With "real data" dedupe / compression is about 50% more or less. Yes, we skip deleted blocks (NTFS only) and empty blocks.

Best regards,
Hannes

[RobertKO]

Danke Hannes. Viele Grüße nach Österreich aus Südtirol
ich werde das jetzt alles überprüfen noch.