Veeam Backup File Size Balooning

[briguyiu]

We have all of our local backups with a retention of 7 days. We then ship those offsite using Backup Copies for 30 days. If you look at the file sizes of the 30 days offsite, there is a backup every 7th day that is almost double in size. Locally, there is one per 7 restore points of the same nature. Are there any logical explanations for this from a Veeam perspective, or should I be looking deeper at the data during this day when the backups are run?

[Vitaliy S.]

Do you have any maintenance tasks scheduled for this time on your VMs? Based on the observed pattern there is something going on in the VMs every weekend that generates enough changes to double the size of the local backups and remote ones.

[dellock6]

And the usual suspects here are defrag operations or some application maintenance (database compact, exchange maintenance...).

[briguyiu]

And this is why I love this forum. I had thought that maybe it was maybe the Deduping that we were doing in 2012 R2, but the schedules we set didn't operate during this time. The suggestions to look at the defrag operations, made me look deeper at the actual tasks involved in the deduplication, after I ruled out degrag and it's timeframe. Sure enough, there are jobs that run weekly at 2:55 and 3:45 AM every Saturday, that aren't set in the GUI at all. Thanks guys!!!!