Page file in v6

[lwarner]

I thought the Windows page file was not backed up in v6 and above? I'm running 6.5, and I see the pagefile in the Backup Browser on every server. I have "Exclude swap file blocks from processing" enabled. Am I missing something?

[Helqasem]

The Veeam Backup Browser will display the index of any disk backed up. We do not write changes to the index inside the backup. Page file exclusion just skips page file blocks during backup, so the file system still thinks its there but in reality its not. Windows flushes/recreates this file on boot.

To verify page file exclusion run a full backup with it switched on, then run the same backup straight after with it switched off. If there have been no changes, the size of the backup files in the repository should be different.

[Gostev]

The above explanation is actually not entirely correct. The swap file is not recreated at boot, it actually exists in backup (which is why use see it in Backup Browser during FLR process, at the point when boot did not happen yet). However, the content of this file is (mostly) zeroed out, so it does not take any space in the backup file.

The amount of data saved by swap file exclusion is provided in the job's statistics for each VM, there is the designated log line with this information. This reflects the amount of data in swap file data blocks that were skipped from processing and not stored in the backup file (or, to be precise, stored as zeroed data blocks). The processing engine simply does not read or transfer the contents of the virtual disk blocks belonging to swap files, storing zeroed data blocks in place of those data blocks in backup file (or in replica virtual disk).