Backup Job, file system objects manual entry

[JimWright]

New user of this software, looking at upgrading from an old version of a competing product. One thing that surprised me when setting up a backup job, when setting this up as a File Level Backup, the Objects pane required that paths be specified manually. With my 'other' software, it would connect to the target machine and display all drives, which you could then expand to reveal folders, sub-folders, etc, and then just check off the ones you wished to backup.

I can certainly see in a number of cases manual entry is good enough, but being able to just click to select seems like a handy feature to have. Unless I'm missing something obvious, which is entirely possible.

This particular backup job is backing up our Windows file server, and only certain shared folders need to be backed up.

[DGrinev]

Hi Jim and welcome to the community!

In the current version of the Veeam B&R, there is no file-level backup job.
The new version 10 will bring on board the feature called "NAS Backup" or file-level backup.
I cannot tell the exact date of release, but it is around the corner.

Thanks!

[JimWright]

In the Job I created, under Backup Mode, there are three choices, Entire Computer, Volume Level Backup, and File Level Backup. The File Level is the one I have selected for this job. I'm running Veeam B&R 9.5 update 4.

I don't have an easy way of uploading a screenshot at present.

[DGrinev]

Got it, the manual object's entry is required when you are creating an agent backup job for windows computer through the Veeam B&R console.
If you deploy a standalone Veeam Agent on the server, you will be able to create a local backup policy and add objects through the explorer view.

Thanks!

[Virtuollie]

The reason for this behaviour is, that Veeam in the current version only supports image-level backups. Even the option „File Level“ selected by you does a backup on image level, it just checks at first which blocks of the image your files reside on and leaves out all the others. That is why File Level is even slower than volume- or image-based.

Hope that clarifies your questions.

[JimWright]

OK, this makes sense! Appreciate the info!