Integrity check

[MrSpock]

Hello,

I perform backups of all my VM's every night, and I keep 15 rollbacks. Is the last backup (which is merged with the previous backup to make a full backup) guaranteed to be 100% consistent, even if there have been errors during any previous backup (including errors not detected by Veeam Backup, e.g. bad sectors on the hard drive)? Will those errors propagate through all subsequent backups, without being detected?

Is there any reason to once in a while move all rollbacks and make a clean restart of the backup job?

Best regards,

MrSpock

[Gostev]

Hello,

If backup did not complete successfully then VBK will not be complete and consistent obviously. However, you will always be able to restore to previous state.

VBK inconsistency is detected automatically in the beginning of each backup cycle, and VBK is automatically restored to the consistent state using rollback files before proceeding to the actual backup.

At this time we do not have protection against bad hard drive sectors, cosmic ray changing data bit and such. This type of issues, although extremely rare, is exactly why some companies choose to also archive backups to tapes periodically.

However, in the upcoming 4.0 we are planning to introduce some new functionality to address these concerns:
1. Automated backup integrity checks. This should address issues with both software and hardware related backup file data corruption.
2. Ability to initiate "full" backup on demand (and automatically).

If you are worried about backup corruption on hardware level, performing clean restart of backup job occasionally may be good practice, at least it definitely will not hurt. Alternatively, you can just test the restore from time to time.

Hope this helps!

[MrSpock]

Gostev,

Thanks for your reply!

It would be really nice to be able to do either manual or automated integrity checks once in a while. I will take a look at 4.0 when it's available.

What's the best practice when performing a clean restart? Is it sufficient to delete/move all vbk/vrb-files or do I have to delete the backup job and then readd it?

[Gostev]

With the current version, you need to re-create the job to perform "clean restart".