BE 2010 "Full Backup - Using Archive Archive Bit" job weirdness

[RyanW]

So I'm checking my backup jobs and I look at my latest for the BE server, which is a physical server running Server 2008 64 bit.

According to the restore job, my C:\windows directory is 1.5GB but according to windows explorer it's something closer to 15GB. 

These are not incremental jobs, but the info does show the date/time the backup ocurred and says "Snapshot Full" in parenthesis.

So my question is, why are filesizes not being reflected properly here?

This is running BE 2010 R2 on a full backup job with AFO enabled.

See photo here:
 

http://imgur.com/c7O79.jpg

See how my Program Files (x86) is 375,000KB?  Why?  It's not an incremental backup, it's a FULL BACKUP. It's actually about twice that size on my actual hard disk.

[RyanW]

Ok I just restored a directory that hasn't changed in months.  It's a fraction of the size of the original directory. :\

[RyanW]

Ok

According to this:

In Exchange 2007, Microsoft almost stopped non-VSS backups and VSS has to be used for MS Exchange database backup. Same has happened with Windows 2008 also. So, Backup Exec always does a VSS backup with Windows 2008, even if AOFO is not enabled.

from here: https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/advanced-open-file-option

I have no way with Server 2008 to disable AOFO. Even though I have now explicitly disabled it, my jobs are still using a VSS provider to grab data from my servers.

I'm still not sure why my VSS snapshots are not properly sized compared to the actual data on the disk.

[Hemant_Jain]

When you backup c:\windows from file system, it does not include system files, which are protected through "system state" selection. Hence restore selection would show very small size for c:\windows as it contains only non-system files in c:\windows folder. System files are protected using system state selection. So, you dont have much to be concerned about. When calculating the size, you should consider the byte count on your backup of system state and byte count of backup of c:\windows folder.

Please mark it a solution, if this is useful.

Thanks

[RyanW]

Ok, that could make sense. But the system state backup would have to be something like 15GB.  I guess I'll look tomorow.