Backing up VM with previously excluded disk

[wa15]

Fellow Veeam'ers, question for you:

I have a large VM that at some point has had select disks excluded from backups (with the option to remove disk from VM configuration enabled). All of these disks were backed up at some point within the last month but we have enabled and disabled backup of these disks one week after another as part of a migration project. However, today I would like to have a complete backup of the VM including ALL disks. Questions:

1. Is it enough to simply do an incremental backup in this case?
2. If the VBK that the incremental relies on (we are doing weekly synthetic fulls + regular incremental) does not include one of the disks, how does the incremental I run today include everything?
3. Do I need to run an active full in this case? I would like to avoid this unless really necessary since we are dealing with 9TB of data.

Thanks in advance!

[PTide]

Hi,

1. Yes, if you mean that you want to have a restore point that can be used to restore the whole VM. However if you want to have a single vbk file that contains everything then you should run synthetic full.

2. In your particular case incrementals do not include all the disks, neither does full. If combined they constitute the state when the machine had all disks present - some blocks are taken from vbk, others are taken from vib(s).

3. No, active full is not necessary. If you don't want to run synthetic full then you can do an incremental backup and use Backup Copy Job to create a single full without creating a new chain.

Thanks

[wa15]

Thanks a ton!