Open files backup

[geksi]

It is possible to backup a file server with open files ( such as word, excel, etc.)?? Business-case: an a fileserver with 100 or more connected users working with ms office files but not closing their periodically. What happens to the open files ?

[foggy]

If application-aware image processing is enabled for the backup job, Veeam B&R will create application-consistent VM image - all applications will be quiesced and prepared for hot backup, memory buffers flushed to disk to avoid any data loss.

Or are you asking about the original VM itself?

[geksi]

This means that the option respectively "vmware tools quiescence" actually must always be active for all jobs.
Then that's not an option, this is a must. Why highlighting this as an "Option"?
In other words, what is a business-case that does not require this two options -> (application-aware image processing or vmware tools quiescence)?

[foggy]

It is indeed recommended to have AAIP enabled for all the VMs running VSS-aware applications (especially highly transactional, such as Exchange and SQL Server) and VMware Tools quiescence enabled for all other VMs, if you want to have consistent backups. However, if the job contains only VMs that do not support VSS (in most cases that would be Linux or pre-Windows Server 2003 R2 VMs), you do not need to enable AAIP. Also there are cases when AAIP is not required (for example, continuous or near-continuous replication, which should be performed in crash-consistent manner, since VSS quiescence causes too much impact on the application and doing this every few minutes throughout the day can seriously affect its performance) or cannot be performed (when you backup VMs where you can't get any access to the guest OS or VMware Tools cannot be installed) and crash-consistent backups is the only option.