What is Microsoft Azure Backup backing up when nothing has changed?

Iron Contributor

We have been using the backup agent (MARS) to back up some on premise files to Azure. Last week I noticed that, for one drive, it said that it transferred the exact same amount of data to Azure every day. I thought that was curious so I checked and the only two people who ever use that drive were both on vacation last week so I don't think anything changed.

 

My understanding is that the incremental backups only transfer data when something has changed. Does it maybe always transfer some information anyway - perhaps information about the restore point? Or is there a way to tell what Azure Backup thinks has changed?

2 Replies

How much is the change that is reported as changed? If it is greater than few bytes, I would suspect a defrag or something might have been triggered on that machine. 

When I know no-one has done anything it is almost always 3.59 MB but every once in a while it will be 251KB.

 

It has been doing this since I started backing up those folders 4 months ago so I don't think it is an issue. I suspect that whatever it is doing is happening on other folders as well but their contents change every day so I have no way to tell. I just find it curious.