backup size increased suddenly

[BlackHoleTea]

I've been using ABB for several home laptops for quite some time. It is setup to run hourly, which has been working for more than 6 months. I recently noticed it's been backing up a large amount of data for one laptop, and only completing backups once or twice/day instead of hourly, due to the amount it's backing up. The laptop has not had any major changes, it's just email, web, a few games, etc. ABB reports 1.2TB transmitted on on 6/3, 1.2TB on 6/4, 1.3TB on 6/5, and today one of the backups failed which is why I started digging into it. The laptop is only about 600GB, so it seems to backup the entire thing, twice/day, for the last several days. It seems ABB has lost track of the blocks, or something.
How do I correct this, short of deleting the entire backup and starting from scratch? Is there a simple way to delete all versions and start over, or have it do an analysis/rebuild of what it has stored?

 

[fredbert]

That seems rather odd. In the task do you include just the system volume or include everything? Maybe it is trying to backup attached drives, which might be being ejected during the backup task. I think it can do external drives, but I may be wrong.

I would also consider why you have to backup every hour. There’s more chance of a task not completing and being cancelled. Once cancelled the task transfers a full backup to ensure it has the correct data.

 

[ed.j]

Is there a program running which is constantly creating or modifying a large number of files? Maybe a music or photo program?

 

[BlackHoleTea]

That seems rather odd. In the task do you include just the system volume or include everything? Maybe it is trying to backup attached drives, which might be being ejected during the backup task. I think it can do external drives, but I may be wrong.

I would also consider why you have to backup every hour. There’s more chance of a task not completing and being cancelled. Once cancelled the task transfers a full backup to ensure it has the correct data.

Rather odd, agreed, this is why i'm here...

Full system backup, no attached drives.
Nothing unusual running on the computer, there's no reason for this amount of delta to be backed up.

Every hour works fine for 4 computers for the last year. If a backup runs long, a subsequent schedule is skipped with a warning message. It is not "cancelled", ABB understands what's happening and it doesn't cause an issue.

 

[Telos]

Have you tested a restore? Your backup may be corrupted.

 

[BlackHoleTea]

Have you tested a restore? Your backup may be corrupted.

Tried to restore a couple files from several months ago (retention is 6 mo), and it seems to be working.

I agree the backup may be corrupted. My original question: Can I trigger the program analyze & rebuild metadata (or whatever it is) and salvage the existing 6 months of backup information, or do I have to delete it all and start over fresh?

 

[BlackHoleTea]

I think I may have solved my own problem. I downloaded the ABB logs from support center. And spent some time parsing through them. I found many occurances of a message like:
Previous snapshots of C:\ not found. Start to perform full backup of the device.

After some more 'research' it pointed to a Microsoft VSS / Shadow Copy issue, which is related to Recovery Points. I then found this computer was set to max use of 1% space for restore points. The other computers were set to 4% or 10%. I changed all to 10%. And, so far, so good... I will have to conitnue to monitor for a couple days to be sure.

I also uninstalled some Dell software from this PC, although I do not think it was related, someone somewhere mentioned that conflicted too.