[SOLVED] a way to find what was changed

[naviseyer]

The backup for our server usually increase slightly everyday or every otherday. For some reason my backup on 4/4/20 is 1.8TB and on 4/8/20 it is only 1.65TB. The amount of folders and files are the same.

That is alot of data for a user to have deleted which i dont think is possible specially because we have a skeleton crew in place because of the covid19 thing going on in NYC.

Is there somewhere i could check to see if large amount of files where somehow deleted between 4/4 and 4/8.

I also have Vss copies running and i did a quick once over and cant find any differences between the main share folder sizes from today and the 4/4 .
In properties the size still match. I didnt compare every folder but the folders that contain the the majority of files like project,estimates all still match.

if there is somewhere on the server where i could see if large amount of files were deleted i would apreciate it if someone could let me know.

if someone has an idea of another reason something like this could happen please let me know...


Besides spinning up a backup and comparing it 1 folder at a time im not sure what to do

thanks in advance for any help

Navi

 

[alceryes]

WIll take some work but, if you have a test environment that you could restore both backups to, you could use something like Beyond Compare to show the differences. The program is mainly use for syncing A to B data sets and delta copies but you could just report and not copy so that you can see where the change occurred.

 

[naviseyer]

I was hoping for someplace on the server where I could see if files have been deleted. Kinda like when I look in the shared folders and I can see what users have what files open and how long the have been open.

we only have 4 shared folders that actually contain that amount of data.
it would be estimates or projects . No other shared folders actually contain more then a few gigs .

guess it’s back to the drawing board. I guess I can compare one folder at a time from the backup to current . I have done this on the folders that have enough data to lose the .15tb or 150 gigs...

thanks for the reply

 

[USAFRet]

FreeFileSync can compare two folders (or folder trees), and highlight the differences.

FreeFileSync

Download FreeFileSync 13.5. FreeFileSync is a free open source data backup software that helps you synchronize files and folders on Windows, Linux and macOS.

freefilesync.org

 

[popatim]

Can you get a full directory output of the backups?
If so dump that to a text file, one for each of the two backups, then a simple file compare will do. Even dos/cmd FC would be helpful.