Issue with Windows Server Backup

[Clauferhf]

Issue with Backup of Two Windows Servers

I'm facing an issue while backing up two Windows servers. They are provisioned with two VirtIO disks of 500GB each, which are occupying 232GB and 147GB, respectively. The problem is that when I back them up, the backup file occupies the entire 1TB HDD that is provisioned for the backup.

In the same environment, I have a virtual machine running Ubuntu Server with the same 1TB capacity, but only 9.8GB consumed. This backup process completed without any issues and very quickly.

What could be the issue in this case? The backup disks are formatted as LVM and XFS

 

[Chris]

Issue with Backup of Two Windows Servers

I'm facing an issue while backing up two Windows servers. They are provisioned with two VirtIO disks of 500GB each, which are occupying 232GB and 147GB, respectively. The problem is that when I back them up, the backup file occupies the entire 1TB HDD that is provisioned for the backup.

In the same environment, I have a virtual machine running Ubuntu Server with the same 1TB capacity, but only 9.8GB consumed. This backup process completed without any issues and very quickly.

What could be the issue in this case? The backup disks are formatted as LVM and XFS

Hi,
please verify that you have the qemu-guest-agent installed and activated for the Windows machine, together with the trim option. It might be, that because of the missing trims, the blocks on the storage are never freed as seen by the underlying qemu process, and therefore included in the backup.

For details see https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#qm_virtual_machines_settings

 

[VictorSTS]

Once QEMU agent is installed and the "discard" option is enabled for your drives, you can install and run sdelete -z <drive_letter:> to write zeores on all the free space in the drives so your backup won't include garbage of old deleted files.