Free Agent: no CBT used after upgrade to 5.x

[cosmik]

Hello,

on a laptop running version 2.x of the free agent I took the plunge to upgrade it last week to the latest version (5.something). The backup was previously configured to be a complete (system) backup to an external USB drive. Backup would start automatically upon connection. I did not modify any of the backup settings after upgrading to veeam 5.x.

Having completed Veeam backup I connected the designated USB drive. The system drive had a multitude of partitions, boot, recovery, laptop manufacturer stuff etc. I noticed the following issues:
(a) Backup of the main volume that hosted \windows did not employ any CBT technology. Which was strange since other volumes were backed up utilizing CBT and examination of older backups showed that CBT was employed in 2.x-era backups, when backing up the same main volume!

(b) The resulting backup was huge, close to the size of the drive itself. Seemed like this was a full and not an incremental backup. Reason could be that I've set up Veeam to take a full backup each September and last backup taken was months ago... I'm mainly stressing this point to point out that the backup taken in (c) below could not be a full backup...

(b) I cloned the laptop disk to an SSD to improve it's speed a bit, using Macrium Reflect. Had to shrink the main volume size a bit, but did no other adjustments to the system otherwise. Re-connected the external USB to take a backup, mainly to check if CBT would be enabled on the main volume of the disk and if the size would be small (this had to be an incremental backup). Alas, another huge backup was taken, slow again with no CBT in action...

The laptop was of a family relative, so I can not perform any tests under your guidance. I'm mostly seeking something obvious to the devs which is not known to me. That is, if this is some sort of expected behaviour for Veeam and if there's something I can do to perform its backup performance...

[Vitaliy S.]

Michael,

Do you see a CBT label in the job session?

Thanks!

[cosmik]

Hello Vitaliy,

thanks for taking the time to check my older thread. The laptop I'm mentioning in the current thread was being backed up in system mode and not file mode. As to your question: as mentioned in my original post, after upgrading to 5.x I did see CBT labels, but not next to the main (c:\) volume. In other words, I saw the "[CBT]" indicator next to other volumes, but not next to C:.

In Veeam 2.x the [CBT] indicator was also depicted next to the C:\ volume.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the clarification! The issue does not seem to be a known one, so I would recommend running another job pass and if you still don't see CBT being used, then opening a support case is needed here (you can do that for the FREE agent as well).

Thanks!

[cosmik]

Apologies for taking the time to respond here. Unfortunately, as I've noted in my first post here, I've returned the laptop to its owner so I can't try running another job pass. If I get a hold of it I'll open a case and take things from there.

Thank you for your time and effort here.