My Veeam server is running on 2012 R2, and is using Microsoft deduplication for backups. So inline dedup is on for my jobs, compression is off and I'm using the LAN target. This is v7 patch 4 version.
I'm backing a 2012 R2 file server, which is 4TB VM in total size. This also has deduplication on!

What surprises me, is that VBK that this job created (only VM in the job) is 4TB in size too. Yet the VM, has ~1.5TB of free space spread out over several disks. I'm using an application aware backup too in Veeam for this server.
So my question is, why is the VBK so large? Isn't it meant to skip the free space?
Thanks.