Large Daily Backups

[AWimpyNiNjA]

My daily backups have been getting larger and larger since I created the initial full backup. Is there anyway to reduce the size of these jobs? I only run one backup a day on my workstation, and I don't see myself changing that much data on the drive. When I tested Storagecraft, my daily backups were around 150MB each, but my most recent Veeam backup is 22GB. Disk Defrag is off, no updates were done recently, and all of our business applications are cloud based. Why is Veeam using up so much more data?

I'm on Veeam Agent for Windows version 2.0.0.700 - Free Edition
Backing up to a Synology NAS with a shared folder on the network
1 backup per day
Entire computer is selected for backup
Keep backups for 365 days
No periodic full images
Compression level Optimal (recommended)
Storage optimization - LAN target
Encryption enabled

[Dima P.]

Hello and welcome to the community AWimpyNiNjA,

Please clarify the size of you full backup (.vbk) and incremental backup file (.vib)? What is size of the volume you are backing up (used vs free)? Thanks.

[AWimpyNiNjA]

VBK = 85GB
1st VIB = 8.6GB
2nd VIB = 16.3GB
3rd VIB = 23.1GB
4th VIB = 16.2GB
5th VIB = 15.8GB

Between 16GB and 23GB per night, on a machine that doesn't do much.

I have a 128GB SSD drive with 2GB of free space. The used space is from installers and software that I frequently test, but I haven't downloaded any new software installers, or tested any new versions of current software in the last week.

[vClintWyckoff]

Do you have an active anti-virus that could have done scans in between those backup runs?

[AWimpyNiNjA]

AV is installed, but No scans during that time period.
Backups are now around 20GB each.

[Dima P.]

AWimpyNiNjA,

Thanks. To clarify, SSD volume is the only one you are backing up, right?

[AWimpyNiNjA]

Yes, one volume.

I have the backups disabled at this point. It was just taking up a ridiculous amount of space on my NAS.

[Dima P.]

I am out of ideas. Please check with our support team and let them investigate your application logs. Thanks.

[simplicity]

We have already reported this samething going back to pre GA and it was answered with pretty much that that is the amount of data that is changing daily but the funny thing is if we put ShadowProtect back on the daily backups sizes shrink 80-90%. (No we never had both VAW and ShadowProtect installed at the same time)

We stopped deploying VAW as a repalcement because backups were not finishing over night to the our CloudConnect.

Ticket 02253667

[AWimpyNiNjA]

Sounds exactly like my issue.

Storagecraft backups are tiny, yet Veeam is using massive amounts of space. In my final test, I rebooted the PC, took a fresh backup, and logged out. PC Sat there doing nothing (No AV, No Patch Installs, No users logged on, etc...) And the backup was 11GB...

[Technogod]

Acronis does the same thing on my system. It seemed to be linked to VSS. When I switch to Acronis shadow copy it fixes the problem.

[chaycock]

People have been asking for a feature that will let you see exactly what is being backed up in the vib incremental files for quite a long time...exactly for this reason...to help troubleshoot issues like this.