Why would the size of stsadm -o backup vary night by night?
Platform MOSS 2007 SP1 We have 1 farm. On it nightly we run a vb script that enumerates all the site collections, and then, for each, runs: stsadm -o backup -url http://companySP/sites/admin -filename \\nasSPACE\sharepoint_bkup\Backups\2011-08-31\companySP-2011-08-31-00-10-00.dat where companySP/sites/adm is replaced by each of the file collection names. What we are seeing is that for the 99% of the site collections, the sizes are generally the same, with some growth, from night to night. The largest collection, however, has a size that varies from 40 GB to 90 GB. While some variation is expected, I am relatively certain people are not deleting 40-50 GB regularly from the site colleciton. We are not getting an error message when this occurs - just a smaller than expected .dat file. Does anyone have any ideas what might be happening that might cause a smaller size? Other than running out of disk space - I don't think that is the issue with the varying sizes.
August 31st, 2011 2:23pm

Maybe record the content database sizes for a couple of weeks and compare against the backup sizes. See if there's some bloating or truncating that you can correllate.Steve Clark, MCTS | Twin-Soft.com
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September 7th, 2011 6:09pm

Hi, Before carrying out the backups observe the content DB and site collection size. Compare these when you get 40 and 90 GB of data. Thanks, Rahul Rashu
September 8th, 2011 6:16am

I would love to figure out a way to output the size of the content db and site collection size. stsadm does give me a rough indication of size, and that stays pretty constant from night to night. It is a bit frustrating for stsadm to indicate that it is DONE, but never output warnings or errors about this stuff.
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November 7th, 2011 2:32pm

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