Shadow Copies

[backupquestions]

Does taking a few volume shadow copies of large file share volumes each day have a big effect on the CBT for that VM? Say if I have a 2TB file server VM and I am having a change rate per day of only 15GB.. Now I turn on VSC on the file share volume and store a few days worth of previous versions, which only adds up to a few GB of space total... Does that just increase my CBT by whatever amount of space the VSC is using? So if I have a limit for Shadow copies set to 5GB that should only add up to 5GB changed blocks? Or does it literally pile up every single file as a changed block and add tons of space needs for incremental backups?

Just think it would be nifty to be able to have previous versions available right in Windows because say if a Veeam job failed that night, then tomorrow we get request for a file from last night, the native shadow copy would still be there to use to restore that file.

[skrause]

As with any windows file manipulation, the amount of blocks flagged for CBT can vary widely simply due to how the files line up (or don't line up) with the VMFS block size.

We send our VSS copies to a separate Windows volume on our file servers and then exclude that from our backups to avoid adding excessive changed blocks.

[backupquestions]

That's a good idea, I didn't think of doing it that way. Thanks