Viewing contents of an incremental?

[jedimastermopar]

Is there anyway to view the contents of an incremental backup? We have a file server with 3-4 GB incremental and we are curious as to what is in them.

[foggy]

Vince, with guest OS indexing enabled you have the ability to browse the guest OS file system and search for guest OS files in the selected VM backup at a specific restore point using Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager. Thanks.

[jedimastermopar]

I have that enabled, but am I able to view just the contents of the incremental versus a merged full backup? I only want to see what was captured in the incremental. Is that possible?

[Dima P.]

Vince,

Unfortunately it does not work that way.
When you select VM backup at a specific restore point you will be able to view a full backup + increment. However the increment itself is a portion of data that was changed since previous increment (or full), so without the full backup it is completely unreadable.

[foggy]

Remember, that Veeam B&R is a block-level solution (not file-level), so incremental backup file will contain all the blocks that have changed since the job previous run. Those blocks could belong to different files and contain only parts of the files so there's not much sense in reading them at all.

[jedimastermopar]

In t his instance I don't need to recover or read the contents of the files, I would like to be able to see the filenames though. If that was possible it would be great.

[Dima P.]

Vince,

The backed up files could be reviewed as it was mentioned before. The increment file, *.vib - is stored on the specified repository together with .vbk (the full backup file), but it could not opened or reviewed.

[foggy]

To track files changed in the guest OS we would need to deploy a persistent agent there, which is not the case since Veeam B&R is a block-level agentless solution.