Turn on Fast Delta for Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL protected systems - x360Recover

Written By Tami Sutcliffe (Super Administrator)

Updated at February 26th, 2025

Why use Fast Delta for SQL and Exchange Servers?

If a protected system houses a large database system, such as Microsoft Exchange or Microsoft SQL, you can improve backup performance by turning on Fast Delta.

  • Due to Microsoft's  'cheating' (bypassing the normal Volume Shadowcopy Services processes), the agent cannot rely on VSS to determine changed blocks for SQL and Exchange database files.
  • Instead, the agent has to essentially perform a full backup scan of the entire database, in order to find block changes on every backup when using the standard backup algorithm.

Fast Delta is a block change scanning tool that dramatically improves the backup performance of large database applications (such as Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL)  Enabling Fast Delta can reduce backup times from hours to minutes for larger deployments.

  • Fast Delta interrogates the raw VSS cluster data directly to determine block changes.
  • Fast Delta may also be relevant when backing up other large files that are open and locked, like virtual machine disk images.

To turn on Fast Delta:

1. From the Services app on the target machine, stop and disable the agent service.

2. Navigate to the agent installation folder.

3. Open the aristos.cfg file with administrative privileges.













4. In the aristos.cfg file, update the USE_FASTDELTA line to true.

5. When you are finished, save the file and restart the agent service.

 



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