Alex,
So far I am loving the Synthetic Backup for Files and Images. It will make a tremendous difference in our ability to complete the backups overnight/weekends for clients with slow upstream connections.
Right now our biggest outstanding issue is with the situation where a client reorganizes their files by moving them to a new folder - often to sort by month or to an "Archive" folder. All of the files must be re-uploaded which can take days, not to mention the extra storage space that is consumed for the 90 days until the original files get purged.
I believe that other backup solutions have solved this, I am wondering if client side dedupe addresses this situation, and if not, could it be designed to?

Is there a way to see what files were uploaded and file size that was uploaded in the course of a New Backup Format synthetic backup? I too am seeing a large amount of data uploaded by some computers that don't have much new file creation or file changes daily. Knowing the what is taking bandwidth and storage might help me optimize what might be excluded from the backup.

Haven’t found a way using the mbs portal to see exactly how much data gets uploaded for a specific file or partition during a synthetic bacjpkuo, but the plan details on the actual server let me know how much got copied in the cloud.
For image backups we exclude folders that get backed up via file level backups.
For Virtual Disks, we exclude the D: drive data vhdx’s since again that gets backed up via file backups.

Thanks Steve Putnam. This helps some. We see a few computers whose backups should not be too large daily that actually upload 20 GB or more daily. Files are primarily stored on external file servers so users work during the day should not involve many new or changed files. The large upload causes increased storage usage and a longer backup duration making it difficult to complete backups of all computers overnight with the available data bandwidth. I would like to pinpoint what contributes most to this large upload size.

For File Backup, you can go to Reporting - Backup History and search for the endpoint and find the backup execution in question. Click the execution on the date in question. Once the sidebar opens, click the Details tab for a list of files that were backed up.

If you're referring to Image backup, then we are not backing up files, so there's nothing to report in that regard. The best you can do is to exclude files / folders that are not needed for the restore. Temp folders, Cache Folders for browsers, log folders, hibernation and pagefile / swapfile (if not needed), etc.

Thanks David! In another discussion someone spoke about ost email data files. I think that it was mentioned that we don't need to back these up as the email is stored on the email server and to recover the ost file the emails need to be re-downloaded from the email server. If these ost files are not excluded from the backup, will MSP360 try to back these ost files up? In other words, will excluding the ost files from MSP360 backups make backups run faster and use less bandwidth?

I think the answer to that is, it depends. It's going to depend on how large the OST files are in relation to the rest of the data being backed up. But before you exclude any files please make sure that they're OST files which are just cached copies of emails and calendar and contacts from the server versus a PST file which is an actual email archive or may even be used as the main mailbox when using POP3 email servers. But I think you'll have more luck excluding other folders that are absolutely not needed for backup, whether that backup is a file folder or image backup.

Thank you David. I understand your distinction between ost and pst files. So MSP360 will backup the *.ost files if not excluded from the backup, correct? As you mentioned these ost backups are not likely very usable as the data normally needs to be downloaded from the mail server if lost or damaged. Just trying to determine if a user has an ost mailbox with 20 GB of data if MSP360 will be backing this up and if excluded will be skipped from the backup.

We back everything up by default. We leave it to the customer to decide what does not need to be backed up. There are no default exclusions unless you have the don't back up system and hidden files option checked in the backup wizard. You can Google what file types and locations are not likely needed for backup and you'll probably get a bunch of resources that will list out Windows folders and the like that may help assist. I've been speaking to the team about whether or not we should post a list ourselves, but I haven't made a final decision yet - it's under discussion.

Understand. Thanks for the helpful information.