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I have recently implemented Veeam backup and recovery 6.0, and have noted when backing up my exchange server via incremental updates, it is transferring way more data than expected.

Backup is incremental, and setup to use VSS.

VSS is stable and healthy, according to vssadmin.

Exchange 2007 SP3 running on Windows Server 2008 R2, just last weekend I installed the latest Rollup for Exchange.

I thought the nightly incrementals were large, but perhaps my users really are sending that much mail so I tested taking one incremental backup, waiting 10 minutes and taking a second. The second incremental backup transfered 5.8GB of data. We as an organization are absolutely NOT putting 5.8GB of data on the mail server every 10 minutes.

Are there any other veeam users who have seen something similar?

Is my test faulted?

Are there other considerations for VSS?

Stew
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  • Does Veeam only backup the delta changes, because a normal incremental backup would back up the entire Exchange database (because it's changed) so I'm thinking 5.8GB is pretty small. I'm also assuming that the Exchange transaction logs are being backed up as well (because they've changed) and that this is what accounts for the size of the backup (assuming only delta changes are being backed up). – joeqwerty Apr 12 '12 at 10:53
  • Unfortunately it seems veeam doesn't have a tremendous amount of specific info regarding that, but all signs point to backing up the delta. I understand that transactional logs are backed up, but it doesn't seem entirely feasible that exchange is generating several gigs of transaction logs every 10 minutes. – Stew Apr 12 '12 at 11:09
  • I would like to follow this up by noting that the backups typically come in at around 10GB bigger every day. That is to say, if I run the backup back to back, it is around 5GB, if I let it go a full day it is 10-15GB incremental. That seems fairly reasonable and I am pretty sure my test was faulted. – Stew Apr 17 '12 at 07:10

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Exact same issue here Exchange 2007 Database is approx. 220Gb but only 70 mailboxes. Veeam 6.5 backup incremental size is 50-70Gb! If i run 2 backups in a row it will be around 40Gb each. This fills up the disk fast! I have another customer running exchange 2010 roughly same size database and mailboxes incrementals are around the 20Gb mark. So it appears to be an exchange 2007 + veeam issue. I guess 2007 is changing the DB more often as the transaction logs are set to truncate on backup. Therefore Veeams change block tracker sees a significant part of the edb changing frequently causing the incrementals to be very large in size. Oh well guess its a good reason for them to upgrade exchange.

JohnBaz
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