OST and large incrementals
Ok, I've been evaluating various Acconis products with a view to changing both out internal and our customers backups. I have a ongoing problem VMProtect but that’s a different problem and one issue with B&R. The B&R issue involves is the much discussed large incremental's. I had hoped to sync a onsite NAS to a offsite NAS, Unfortunately 10GB incremental (160GB full) from one PC has scuppered that idea. I have been though the various other posts on this subject and just wanted to gather some more information before I do some experiments.
I'm seeing these large incremental even with little change, however one thought that did occur to me is whilst I may only create a bit of web history which would be minimal changes, Outlook remains open all-day. I use outlook in offline mode so there is a local OST file which is a offline (pst if you like) copy of my Mailbox approx 9 GB. So obviously any email in or out would modify this file.
I understand the Incremental is based on the Snapshot hash, so is my OST file affecting this or is it a disk block level not file level (I don't have a great understanding of this). In Short is my 9 GB OST file the cause of my large incrementals?
I have also notice there are several Snapshot Options:
Software - System Provider (Current)
Software - Accrois VSS Provider
Software - A Software Provider
Hardware - Select Automatically
would a different VSS help?
Disk backup incremental should not get that large just because of outlook files (unless it completely rewrites all 9 Gb to new location between every incrementals). It's impossible to say which files' fragments are included in disk incremental backup, but it's possible to find it out adding folders to exclusions and monitoring incrementals' size. You can setup another plan with a disk backup in order not to experiment with existing working plan. One thing to try is to exclude "c:\system volume information\" (don't forget final backslash) where shadow copies are stored.