PBS client Change detection mode

For both of your cases setting the change detection mode to metadata should give you significant runtime reduction as compared to the current default mode.
Ok. Please one more. If there's only one backup (i.e., done with default mode), if for the second I switch to metadata, will there be any issue, or should all be with the same? This is another way to ask if for the very first backup the data is stored regardless the mode.
 
Ok. Please one more. If there's only one backup (i.e., done with default mode), if for the second I switch to metadata, will there be any issue, or should all be with the same? This is another way to ask if for the very first backup the data is stored regardless the mode.
If there is already a backup created previously with the mode set to default, you can create a new backup snapshot with the mode set to metadata, but the client will not be able to use the pre-existing snapshot as a reference. It will therefore create a new full backup, with the separated data and metadata format. Only subsequent backup runs after that initial backup snapshot with the metadata (or data, using the same archive format) mode will therefore be able to detect changes based on the previous one in the snapshot chain.

Also note, since the new mode uses a different archive format as compared to the old archive format used by the current default mode, deduplication will not be as efficient when storing mixed snapshots on the same datastore, since new and old archive format will produce different chunks.

Hope this clarifies your questions!
 
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Thanks for all the detailed informations in this thread.

I'm adding my feedback here as well;
My use case, I backup my whole windows pc, using pbs-client on debian WSL, which works absolutely amazing, the time went from around 4.5h down to 2h, amazing improvement, thanks a lot!!