Hi again MarvinB,

You may review the notes on VSS SSYTEM FILESET backups found on  page 150 of the NW 7.5.x Admin Guide found here >

http://powerlink.emc.com/km/live1/en_US/Offering_Technical/Technical_Documentation/300-008-471.pdf

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VSS SYSTEM FILESET

Hi MarvinB

The VSS SYSTEM FILESET will only backup level FULL by design.

Hope this helps.

Thanks.

John

Just to clarify, in no situation have I ever seen NetWorker *not* doing a full of VSS SYSTEM FILESET, regardless of the fact that the System-protected files have not changed.

There have been support cases handling this, and eventually (and rather late) we were informed that the VSS infrastructure doesn't allow for such a query with which NetWorker would be able to check have the System protected files been changed or not. So, every full is full, every incremental is full as well. Makes it especially painful considering those 10GBs have to be backed up every day, unless you want to break your saveset "All" to unmanagable salad of individually stated save sets...

If somebody has any different information I would be more than happy to hear them out.

VSS SSYTEM FILESET Full backups are by design.

Can you explain what the VSS SYSTEM Fileset is and why it is so large and takes so much time to get backed up?

Hi Marvin,

     You may take a look on the following KB article.

http://solutions.emc.com/emcsolutionview.asp?id=esg104185

Arun

Hi,

article you mentioned describes specific error, where same parts of OS (system files in this case) are saved more than once.

In "regular" backup runs of Win2008 computer, System files are saved only once - you can verify that they are saved just once using mminfo to get nsavetime for a specific VSS * saveset, and then use nsrinfo -t to list out all of the files that have been backed up under this VSS * name. In my case at least no files have been saved more than once.

Marvin, here is a brief description by MS what comes in VSS SYSTEM * savesets (Win2008):

Windows 2008:
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System Writer

Under Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, this writer will generate a list of files using the following formula:

All static files that have been installed. These files are identified by the attribute writeabletype = "static" or "" (empty string) in the component manifest. This category will include all WRP files; additionally, there might be some files marked as static that are not WRP. For example, games are static but not WRP so that administrators can change parental controls.
The WinSxS folder, which includes all manifests, optional components and 3rd party Win32 files.
All PnP Files for installed drivers (owned by PnP).
All user-mode services and non-PNP drivers.
All catalogs owned by the CryptSvc service.
The files in %windir%\system32 are hard links to the winsxs directory.
The restore application is responsible for laying down files and registry and setting access control lists (ACLs) to match the system snapshot. The appropriate hard links must also be created.
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if you add all up, you'll end up somewhere near 10GB mark on Win2008 system.