MUCH smaller backup size? How to verify

[coreypenford]

We use KVM/QEMU in our environment, so we've had to back up our servers as agent based (A complaint for another time ). It's been okay so far after a few configuration mishaps on my end, but today I noticed something strange with the size of some backups (Please note we do a active full daily, this isn't something incremental)

We were previously using BackupExec to backup a MS SQL server. The job selection with BE was very limited, i.e. we grabbed the inetpub folder off C:, and some select database's. Nothing else. The total backup size reported was still 650GB after compression (but no dedupe)

With Veeam now, the backup selection is even wider. I've selected the operating system, the whole C: drive, and it appears from using the SQL viewer, it grabs all databases on the instance (Since the exclusion menu/options available with Veeam are another complaint for another time..). The total size for this backup is 31GB after compression, and Veeams dedupe.

But that is a BIG difference, that I'm not willing to shrug off as to dedupe.

If I click on the properties of the backup disk, Veeam tells me the data size is 245GB, the backup size our 31.3GB, with dedupe at 4.1X and compression at 1.9X. The original size on the server object says 79.3GB.

This seems way too big a change to be correct, especially with the data size only reporting 245GB. BackupExec isn't the best product but its hard to believe it was grabbing less and hitting 650GB compressed.

Does anyone have any input into these numbers? Or better yet, a way to verify?

[Dima P.]

Hello coreypenford.

The best way to confirm that your backup is fully functional would be to perform a test restore ( you can do a Bare Metal Recovery to a test VM but make sure it's isolated from your production network to avoid interference with production application).

[coreypenford]

How do you perform a bare metal recovery from an agent backup? The only option I have is to export disk contents as a virtual disk. Should I try to boot from that disk?

[Dima P.]

Create a Recovery Media as an iso file an mount it to your KVM machine and then perform Bare Metal Recovery to a VM.