Backup Impact on Converting Disk from MBR to GPT

[afarz]

For various reasons, we're going to have to convert a disk from MBR to GPT in order to expand the drive beyond 2TB in vSphere & Windows. This VM is backed up nightly via a reverse incremental scheme. We're going to do a new full backup before we do the conversion (just in case...more backups the better) but what kind of impact would the change have on backups going forward.

While I assume we could do file level restore from the previous backups; would volume or whole disk restore have to come from a new backup chain? Is it possible to continue on with the backup chain that we currently have or just start a new one? Are there any other considerations I'm not thinking of?

Appreciate any help or guidance. Thanks.

We are using VBR 9.5.

[skrause]

If you restore the entire disk from an old chain, you should be ok on the disk type as it should just overwrite the entire vmdk file.

But you may want to do a test run with a dummy machine to see how VBR reacts to the change in disk type.

[Andreas Neufert]

Veeam Backup & Replication backup on image VM level. This backup process do not care about the filesystem or disktype used.
So you can always restore a disk or VM to the stage of backup.

In case of File Level Recovery and Explorers, Veeeam support GPT disks. There should not be any problem with changeing the disk format.
If you want to be on save side, please create and Active Full with the current Job. Specifically if you do disk size changes. Veeam should detect them anyway and trigger a new full from the disk/VM with Change Block Tracking reset.