I'm having an issue with drastic differences in back-up sizes on specific days, which also prevents us from having a reliable off-site backup system over the internet. What normally is a +-10GB backup a day, increases up to 100GB+ on two specific days of the week. The virtual machine that is the culprit has several drives, 8GB of RAM.
I've monitored the file and application changes using SysTracer to identify big changes on the file level, but that wasn't helpful because it didn't reveal any cause (the changes should not be higher than 15GB).
Since our back-up solution (Altaro) backups at the bit-level, I've heard it can even detect a lot modifications (and as a result back them all up again) after even doing a defragmentation, which by coincidence also runs those days before these huge backups are created. It does surprise me though, because the scheduled defragmentation jobs only run for about 30 seconds max, so I wouldn't assume that a lot of files have been relocated on the drives.
What I would like to know is a way to monitor what's really changing on the bit/block level of the storage so I can identify the cause of these massive backups and hopefully find a solution for that. For example, a tool to see an overview of the total amount of data that has been modified would be incredible helpful to identify the data.
Other tips or instructions are also helpful.
Thank you
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