Purpose of the VBM file?

[BackupBytesTim]

What purpose does the VBM file stored with backup files in a repository serve?

I ask partially out of curiosity, but also because I routinely have recurring problems that are resolved by simply deleting the VBM file since it gets recreated when the backup job runs, so from my perspective this seems like one of those poorly designed aspects of Veeam, possibly carried over from mass VM jobs that is still used by the Agent backing up a single computer even though it serves no practical purpose.

To preempt someone at Veeam asking what problems, there have been different ones, some that haven't reoccurred since the V12 update, but the most recent was something along the lines of "OIB is incomplete and cannot be continued".

[HannesK]

Hello,
the main use-case for VBM files is when the configuration database is lost to find all incremental backups.

I routinely have recurring problems that are resolved by simply deleting the VBM file

I don't ask what the problem was, but I recommend investigating with support instead of deleting VBM files

Best regards,
Hannes