.vbk is to big?

[Klausgodtkjaer]

Hi.

So I have this Veeam Agent Free running on a machine, where I am in the process of moving data away from. The backup is to a VBR.

Two volumes are backed up C: and E: and with the "Volume level backup" as Backup Mode.
C: = 115GB total / 23GB used
E: = 815GB total / 349GB used.

E: have before hand been much more full, but is now been emptied. In Veeam agent, I've set the retension days down to 5 days, to clean out all the old data and free up space on the VBR server. But the .vbk file is 783GB in size, all the older .vib files are gone tho. Veeam agent says "Total backup size 762GB".

Why do I experience the above? Is there any way to make the .vbk smaller to actually match the used space? Is Veeam agent backing up empty diskspace to? If yes, is there anyway to exclude all the empty diskspace in Veeam Agent?

I guess I am just trying to understand how the Veeam Agent works...

[Dima P.]

Hello and welcome to the community Klaus.

If you were using forever incremental backup mode (incremental backup without periodic full backups) you may recognize the fragmentation of the .vbk file on long backup chain or when your source disk was modified: empty blocks are marked as free but might not be overwritten. To fix this problem - perform one time Active full backup to start a new backup chain.

Is there any way to make the .vbk smaller to actually match the used space? Is Veeam agent backing up empty diskspace to? If yes, is there anyway to exclude all the empty diskspace in Veeam Agent?

Veeam Agent for Windows does not process your volumes free space.