Identifying slacks during backup generation for anomaly detection

A method for generating backups of host data, comprising:

• obtaining, by a data protection agent of a host, a backup request associated with an asset of the host;
• in response to obtaining the backup request:
• obtaining file system metadata associated with the asset from a file system metadata repository on a storage of the host;
• identifying data in a disk of the host associated with the asset based the file system metadata;
• generating a backup of the asset using the data;
• identifying slacks within the disk using the file system metadata;
• generating slack metadata associated with the slacks;
• and
• providing slack data and the slack metadata to post processing engines for post processing.

A method for generating backups of host data, comprising:

• obtaining, by a data protection agent of a host, a backup request associated with an asset of the host;
• in response to obtaining the backup request:
• obtaining file system metadata associated with the asset from a file system metadata repository on a storage of the host;
• identifying data in a disk of the host associated with the asset based the file system metadata;
• generating a backup of the asset using the data;
• obtaining file size and cluster size associated with each file of a file system using the file system metadata;
• making a determination that the actual size and cluster size do not match for at least one file of files of a file system;
• in response to the determination:
• identifying a difference between the actual size and the cluster size of the at least one file of files;
• identifying the difference as slacks;
• generating slack metadata associated with the slacks;
• and
• providing slack data and the slack metadata to post processing engines for post processing.