Backup Job Steps - Explained

[FReichelt]

Hello, I have a question:
Namely, is there any official statement by Veeam on what EXACTLY is run at what steps in a normal backup job.
For example:
- Storage initialized = ?
- Preparing guest for hot backup = ?
- Releasing guest = ?

so the basic idea behind each step I understand, but I would be interested to know how Veeam itself explains these steps.

Many greetings,

FReichelt

[Egor Yakovlev]

Hi Florian,

There is no description of each session log step for each task we perform.
Speaking of your 3 examples specifically:
- Storage initialized = we have successfully connected to target side transport agent(one that will write data to repository storage) and did pre-run tests
- Preparing guest for hot backup = Application-aware guest processing takes place here, running VSS in-guest to prepare apps for VM snapshot
- Releasing guest = Another command to guest OS which follows VM snapshot. Now that we have an application consistent VM snapshot we can ask guest OS VSS to release in-guest snapshot

/Cheers!

[FReichelt]

Hi Egor,

thank you for your answer.
then maybe you could describe 2 more steps in more detail. Perhaps there are others who also find this interesting.

Finalizing = ?
Inventorying guest system = ?

Thanks and
Many greetings,

FReichelt

[Egor Yakovlev]

Finalizing = closing steps like session cleanup, closing connections, writing final statuses to database etc.
Inventorying guest system = talk to Guest OS, retrieve its type, version and architecture to determine how to interact with it. If I'm not mistaken we also initiate collection of guest file system index here as well(if enabled in job settings), it runs in parallel with the rest of the job, collecting info for us to use file search in backups later.
/Thanks!