How does Veeam handle an unformated windows volume?

[tgillispie]

Let's say I add a virtual disk to a windows VM, and go into Windows computer manager, disk information, and because windows found a new volume, it asks me to initialize it. I do that, but nothing more - don't format it, etc.

Will a Veeam "active full" backup grab every block of that new volume, or are the blocks of this new volume considered "white space" and compressed/deduped out of the backup?
If I run something like iometer on the new volume, and it writes some blocks, I'm assuming those written (changed) blocks are picked up on the next Veeam (incremental) backup; but my question centers on the blocks in an unformatted windows volume that are never changed and whether their contents are included in Veeam (full) backups or not.

Thanks.

[tsightler]

The simple answer is that the disk would be "backed up" but only the blocks that contain data would be in the backup. Based on whether VMware CBT actually reported the correct info, we might read only the blocks that were changed by writing the signature, or we might have to read the entire contents of the VMDK to determine which blocks had data, eliminating any "whitespace" from the backup. From that point we'd use CBT to track changes on the volume, it doesn't really matter whether the disk is formatted or not, from VMware's perspective (and thus from Veeam) a changed block is a changed block and we will back it up.