Incremental backups disproportionate to data change?

[bartstope]

Hello all,

I've been a user of Veeam backup and replication for many years - I've used it in anger several times and have great faith in veeam products, which is why i was very happy to see the endpoint product for home user desktops. I also think that because of this, I have a fairly good understanding of how the Veeam backup engine works which is why I'm a bit confused.

So, using Endpoint backup I back up my entire computer, a system drive (a 250gb SSD) and my data drive, a 3tb standard hdd.

The system disk contains the OS, browser caches etc, so it's fairly dynamic and I'd expect a lot of changes - my last back up shows about 5gb of changes from the last backup (which was about 3 days previously) which is entirely expected.

My data disk has got just my data on it, and of it is static - indeed, much of it where possible is compressed with ntfs compression because it is read more than it is written - and some if it is never written such as my mp3 collection and my digital camera c2r raw files.

so it confuses me that where i know i've only copied a couple of GBs of photos from my camera, the restore point ends up being around 40gb.

This surprises me because where I use backup and replication at work to backup our servers, cbt seems to perform in much the way i would expect it to - it transfers the changes in scale which is entirely expected and predictable (ie if i copy 20gb to a server disk, the backup tends to be around that size)

So what I'm asking, is this expected?
Is this a consequence of me using NTFS compression on much of my volume, and is there a way to see exactly what is being backed up in each incremental, just in case there is something else going on?

[Gostev]

Hello, this is not normal to have such a huge increments on desktop - but it only means there's some other write activity going on your disks in background that you don't know about, and it touches roughly 80GB of disk blocks (which is obviously not normal and needs to be investigated). Thanks!

[bartstope]

Thank you Gostev,

I am still seeing this issue after some investigations and I've opened a case - 01818265.

Thanks again,

Mark

[marc_al2]

Hello,

I had exactly the same problem while backuping a computer where there is a virtual machine.
when a file is changed, the file is completely copied again (and as my file was around 100 GB...). Of course, I didn't lose 100 GB for every backup...
Now, I do hyper-v snapshots (so the image is never changed)

[Dima P.]

Hi marc_al2,

when a file is changed, the file is completely copied again (and as my file was around 100 GB...). Of course, I didn't lose 100 GB for every backup...

Sounds like you are using a file level backup instead of the volume level backup. Is that right?

[marc_al2]

Hello,

It is a volume backup.
Here is the original post that talks about the problem (the dedup is only made in a session, not in a complete backup chain).

post141648.html#p141648

[chaycockdds]

Is there any chance you have automatic defrag running on that data drive?