Backup verification question

[ashman70]

I was speaking to a colleague the other day who was telling me about one his client's exchange servers that was getting backed up with Veeam 8 standard (Vmware environment) and somehow at some point the boot partition on the vm had gotten corrupted but no one knew when. A routine reboot of the exchange server resulted in an unbootable vm and so they attempted a restore but found out that every backup going back 14 versions contained the corrupted boot partition. Now I know with the Surebackup product veeam has, your backups are verified every time but in this case, isn't there some way for Veeam to detect this kind of corruption? I almost think something like Surebackup should be included in the standard version of Veeam so we know our backups and replicas for that matter are in good shape and useful. I was stunned when my friend told me this story, that all along Veeam was backing up this vm with the corrupted boot partition. Now if it sounds like I am laying the blame solely with Veeam I don't mean to but I feel there should be some better kind of backup verification in the product so a customer doesn't find themselves in this position. I know in the old days it was always the mantra 'test your backups' and with physical media this involved putting the tape in the drive and restoring some files, but in the virtual world its a little more complicated. Am I expecting too much?

[veremin]

I almost think something like Surebackup should be included in the standard version of Veeam so we know our backups and replicas for that matter are in good shape and useful.

With Standard edition you can emulate SureBackup manually.

I know in the old days it was always the mantra 'test your backups' and with physical media this involved putting the tape in the drive and restoring some files, but in the virtual world its a little more complicated.

The said mantra still applies to virtual world.

In case of image-level backups, it's paramount to verify that everything is up and running on OS-level. And, honestly, I don't find automatic restore directly from backup files (that usually doesn't take a lot of time) more complicated than putting the tape in the drive and restoring some files from it. Actually, I think the whole process is much easier.

Thanks.