Forever incremental and deleted blocks

[desmith]

I'm looking at a problem with agent for windows (case 07549431) but expect behaviour is the same on forever incremental for VBR for ESX or Hyper V.

If a significant volume of data is deleted from the backed up NTFS volume, and most of the blocks that stored this data are never overwritten by Windows, do those empty blocks remain in every synthetic full VBK created since the files were deleted?

If so, and the solution is to run an active full, why can't I manually run an active full on an agent in Workstation backup mode? (case 07459518)

[Gostev]

Most people just don't worry about it because the following literally never happens on workstations in real life "most of the blocks that stored this data are never overwritten by Windows". The amount of data on disks only ever grows with time.

[desmith]

I would expect you to the literal definition of literally as it literally does happen.

Database error, log files grow out of control, get truncated, that volume of data is never seen again.

[Gostev]

Such serious database that it needs full recovery model enabled is running on a Workstation? This raises too many questions my answer was of course in the context of this being a typical end-user workstation.

Anyhow, of course the volume of data will be seen again sooner or later - due to another error, organic database growth etc.

[desmith]

It's a backup agent for physical servers and workstations, check in with your product team.

Literally (literally) impacted multiple computers that I noticed, becoming the biggest consumers of space on our repo with whitespace from over a year ago.

Can I just have the pre-existing active full button function in workstation mode?

[karsten123]

Can you not just activate defrag and compact?

[desmith]

Blocks containing deleted files are still part of the VBK, there's no reconciliation with filesystem to discover they've been deallocated

[Gostev]

It's a backup agent for physical servers and workstations, check in with your product team.

Well, considering I designed this product and its editions I certainly don't need to check with anyone. The Workstation edition was designed for the realities of typical Workstation workloads at our target customers and it has reduced functionality comparing to Server edition, which reduces our Support costs and allows us to charge 3x less for it.

If you're running serious databases on your workstations, or other non-standard workstation workloads that leverage transaction logs, then you're supposed to use the Server edition.

[desmith]

It's more of a scheduling mode than an edition, but aside from the 1/3 license consumption, the lack of inbound network connectivity requirement from VBR server is the reason we operate in workstation "edition"

[Dima P.]

Can I just have the pre-existing active full button function in workstation mode?

This option is available in the workstation edition. You can right click the specific agent task in the job and initiate Active Full backup only for specific machine. At the same time you can do the same at the agent side by selecting Active Full either in the main job menu or via the tray app.

the lack of inbound network connectivity requirement from VBR server is the reason we operate in workstation "edition"

It's not controlled by workload type (workstation / server), but with the agent operation mode (i.e. managed by backup server or managed by agent). You can configure 'server' option if the job is controlled by the agent itself.

Thank you and Happy New Year!