Networker: FULL level backup always performed on VM despite selecting incremental level

you indeed have to grasp that with vproxy based vmware image level backups that they will always be reported as full backups, regardless of how much data ended up in the backup.

This as similar to BBB (block based backups) each and every backup scan be used to restore from. No need to apply incremental backup data to a full backup, like with a regular filesystem restore, if you'd choose a incremental backup moment to restore from.

SO due to leveraging the virtual synthetic full approach offered by datadomain, you can do things also like IA (instant access), starting a VM from its backup directly on a DD and then perform a storage migration while the VM is running to the intended datastore.

All nice and good and fine, but the biggest drawback is wrg to accounting and billing as suddenly a system would only have full backups being reported, so if you'd apply the same cost mechanic as with regular filesystem backups using a full/incr schedule, hence costs would explode multiple times over.

The same behavior can be seen when making BBB backups, regardless if it is Exchange or Windows or Linux BBB backups, as all of them show the same behavior of only reporting all backups as a full backup, showing the data being protected by each and every backup, regardless if it is full or incr.

So you might have to convert any mminfo output and rewrite it the totals to an full/incr schedule. For example one could use the NW nsrcapinfo output or a report from Dell DPA, that both show the "frontend protected capacity" of a client, the largest backup from this client from the last 60 days. We are still waiting to see if reporting possibility from newer DPA 19.5 will be able to extract the information correctly from datadomain how much data a client is occupying on a DD, as combined with the frontend protected capacity that might become the replacement for the old retained amount of backup data. Then it no longer would matter how backups are reported by NW even, as only the combination of its largest backup and how much it occupies on a DD (pretty much if it were to be the only client on the DD, as clients are also very likely to dedupe against eachother, but making such a calculation makes things even more complex and maybe impossible to calculate even)

the frontend protected capacity client report, will filter out any Oracle data as NW is unable to determine/differentiate between a full backup or incr or otherwise backup of Oracle backups, even complicating things further more if more than one Oracle DB would be running on a client. Hence it is left out completely.

Dell uses the frontend protected capacity of clients nowadays also for its DPS suite based licensing model, which doesn't care about how much data is retained, but only how large the largest backup of a client is? So with that it also wouldn't matter how long you'd keep the backup data, as the license costs would remain the same regardless compared to the old license approach, but now I am drifting of a bit...