VBR "Backup Properties" Window Questions - What specifically does the "(___GB actual)" indicate? And more questions.

[ColterT]

Never noticed this before until recently. I ask because I'm auditing our repositories and have to do this for dozens of backup chains and I need to be precise.

1. Does this highlighted section indicate that the backup chain is 566GB in size but physically takes up 470GB in the repository after deduplication and compression?
2. In this screenshot, the actual value is smaller - which makes sense due to compression and other technologies. But as a counter example, I have another job reading, "Backup size: 10.0TB (12.5TB actual)" - Is something else going on here?
3. Is there a way to extract the values of listed here (Data size, backup size, deduplication, etc.) programmatically via PowerShell? I'm finding difficulties and perhaps am reinventing the wheel.

[david.domask]

Hi Colter,

1. Yep, you got it. https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=120

Data size (amount of data before compression and deduplication), backup size (actual, physical amount of data stored in the repository after compression and deduplication), original size (size of the selected VM) and total size (sum of all the original sizes displayed in Objects).

2. The second job that is bigger than the actual backup size is a little unexpected but there are a few edge cases I can remember where this happens. Are the following conditions true for that job?

- Forever Forward Incremental retention type (no periodic full backups)
- Deduplication Appliance like Storeonce or DataDomain

Reason I'm asking is because of the note here:

If the forever forward incremental backup chain resides on a deduplicating storage appliance, Veeam Backup & Replication does not reuse empty data blocks of the full backup file. Instead, Veeam Backup & Replication appends data from the first incremental backup file in the chain to the full backup file. As a result, the backup chain may consume more disk space on the appliance.

This is the most common reason I have seen this happen, but there are a few other edge cases, a few of which are purely cosmetic, but a Support Case is your best bet there as Support would need to check a few things (a good starting point is to export the logs for just the job showing this symptom and likely a copy of your Veeam Configuration Database if your company's data export rules allow this)

3. You can indeed get this but we need to use an unsupported .NET Method in Powershell, though the good news is _likely_ there won't be changes on this method so it should be usable.

$backup = Get-VBRBackup -name 'name of your backup'
$rps = $backup

Each COib object in $rps will have a method

Code: Select all

GetStorage()

which returns a CStorage object. CStorage objects represent the actual backup file (storage) on the repository, and the Stats property has what you want for the actual backup size:

Code: Select all

PS C:\Users\david.LAB> $rp.GetStorage().stats

BackupSize       DataSize DedupRatio CompressRatio
----------       -------- ---------- -------------
2318303232 16600048889350          0            71

So you can build out some scripting that fetches that property and you should see the actual backup size on disk.