However, like discussed, if you enable active full in the scheduler, the backup job will switch back to the v7 forward incremental style and will not merge anything. Thus the only way to accomplish is this is to do an active full.
However this methos is not (yet?) available for a normal backup job. It recreates the VBK file and skips empty blocks. For a backup copy job, a method call "compacting" was introduced. When Veeam needs to store or inject more data, it will try to reuse those "blocks" or "empty space", but the file never shrinks. Well the unique blocks of the VM's are being marked as deleted but the VBK file will never become smaller. You might have archived them so they are no longer in production and thus are not being backed up anymore. Imagine you backup 10 VM's today but in a couple of weeks, after a migration, 2 VM's are being deleted. However there is one thing you can not do in Windows, and that is shrinks files. Apparently fragmentation of the backup file has been enhanced greatly as well in v8. Ok so validation (or healtcheck like it is called for a backup copy job) is not an issue. Instead of specifying the VBM file you can also specify the VBK file so the check will be done on this specific file. Also the validator seems to only check the last restore point. Validator didn't spit out correct result. Watch out, I tried to run the example via the powershell_ise, and the &$validator ("/file:" -f files count:']").InnerText) $backupfile = "V:\Backup\Backup Job Linux\Backup Job Linux.vbm" $validator = "C:\Program Files\Veeam\Backup and Replication\Backup\", Maybe the parameters might be a bit more difficult but here is an example. Then with powershell, it is really easy to read out the values. file:'V:\Backup\Backup Job Linux\Backup Job Linux.vbm' /format:xml /report:V:\linux.xml Also you can output the report to an XML file, which should allow you to script around it. In v8 this tool has been extended so you can run it on backups that are not even imported in B&R. You can read more about it on Luca's blog
#Veeam backup incremental manual#
If you do not run Surebackup, in v7 a manual tool was introduced "". You can find this option, in the settings tab of of the Surebackup job. In v7, a new option has been added to verify all the blocks (or the complete backup file). However, with Veeam, it is highly recommended to use Surebackup to execute recovery tests. There are some good reasons why you want to do an active full every month or every 2 months.
It is also why it is called, forever incremental. Now a lot of customers have asked, how can we do active fulls? Well if you configure active full backups, you are basically disabling forever incremental, thus the job won't do any merging. If you would do this in v7, the GUI will complain you are not doing any full backups, in v8 it will switch to forever incrementalĬonfiguring is quite easy. So how do you configure it? Well you just select incremental mode and disable any synthetic or active full backups like so. Still the I/O penalty is lower (3 vs 2 I/O's). What is important is that there is still random I/O, if some job is merging and another on is still in the backup process, the later one might be impacted if you are backing up to the same spindles. Because there is only 1 full VBK file, it uses less disk storage and only stores incremental data.Again this process is fairly random but should be 33% less I/O then reverse incremental backup during merge and it is performed after the snapshots are deleted on the VM. Once the retention points are satisfied, it will inject the oldest VIB file in the VBK file. The forever incremental job uses the same mechanism as the backup copy job for respecting the backup retention policy.What is important is that overall job time might be higher, because the merge process might take longer, but the impact on production is lower. Thus the snapshot on the target VM will be removed earlier then with reverse incremental. The big advantages over reverse incremental is that creating a VIB file is fairly sequential. First of all, the method first creates an increment in a similar way as the traditional forward incremental.Not a lot of fuzz around it but still a nice feature: With the release of v8 a new backup method has been introduced, called forever incremental.