Veeam Not Taking Incrementals

[Verulam]

Hi there

Apologies if this has been answered elsewhere, or if I'm being dim here. I've looked around and can't see this "issue" elsewhere so I suspect I am missing something.

I'm backing up a fairly large vSphere Linux VM (~2.6TB) which takes almost 19 hours to complete the initial full backup (vbk). I was expecting the next scheduled daily backup to then be incremental / CBT and so smaller and quicker (vib). However Veeam took another full backup instead (vbk).

The following settings are configured:

(forward) Incremental
Inline Dedupe
Exlude swap & deleted
Exclude delete file blocks
Encrypted
CBT enabled
Extreme Compression

I was wondering what setting or situation would prevent Veeam from just backing up the differences?

Hope someone can advice, many thanks.


Matt

[veremin]

Does the resulting file have the same full backup extension (.vbk) or is its size that makes believe you it's full backup? Also, can you provide us with the full backup and GFS schedule policies? Thanks!

[Verulam]

Thanks for getting back to me.

Yes the next back was a full (vbk "Veeam full backup file"), which was larger than the first.

There are no GFS policies set and the schedule isn't set to run automatically - it's an ad-hoc backup job. Both options are unticked.

Do I need to quiesce the VM or enable app-aware processing here?

I've been running other Veeam jobs like this in other environments for some time and Veeam has delivered incrementals as expected after the intial full. I'll take another look at these jobs to see if I've missed something silly.

[veremin]

There are no GFS policies set and the schedule isn't set to run automatically - it's an ad-hoc backup job

How exactly you run the job then? Manually starting the job or with the PowerShell script, scheduled task, etc.? Any chance you run on the day scheduled for active full backup? Thanks!

[Verulam]

I just right-click the job and click "Start" as opposed to "Active Full".

However, I just changed the retention policy down to 2 (which is maximum number of full backups I can keep on that drive), ran the backup and it created an incremental (vib) and has deleted the first full!

So perhaps *whatever* it was is sorted now. I've pushed the retention up to 3 and will schedule it to run overnight - see what it spits out...

Thanks.

[Verulam]

Just reporting back - all has been working as exected this week. Thank you for your assistance.