With this post i’d like to start with a small series of blog posts. This series will talk about some probably not well know features of Veeam Backup & Replication.
Usually you’ve got your infrastructure set up, your Veeam backup server up and running, and your daily backup and replication jobs are working fine. And then, all of a sudden, the manager arrives at your desk (or calls you by phone, I leave it to your imagination…) and would like you to install a patch from software development. I think this is pretty common in various companies. Installing patches for your software (doesn’t matter if it’s a Microsoft Exchange server or your internal Apache web server with your intranet running on it) is not only necessary to get the latest features and bug fixes, but it’s also a matter of security to get security flaws patched.
But let’s go back to your infrastructure. You’ve set up a nice running system, which is some terabyte in total size. You can now tell the manager that you have to postpone the patch installation because it’s not possible to get a backup in a reasonable time. Even with incremental backup.
Or you go the easy way and tell your boss that backup of this particular VM is just a matter of minutes. And if there goes anything wrong, we won’t lose as much data as possible.
But why? And how? Let me tell you this with just three words. Veeam Quick Backup.
What is Veeam Quick Backup?
Let’s quote from Veeam helpcenter:
Quick backup lets you perform on-demand incremental backup for VMs. You can use quick backup if you want to produce an additional restore point for one or more VMs in a backup job and do not want to configure a new job or modify the existing one.
Isn’t that great? Just have an additional restore point, which means an additional backup state, of your specific VM, and this without to configure an additional backup job. Nice!
And it is really that easy. Let me show you how you do this. I assume you already opened your Veeam console.
- Click on “Virtual Machines” in the menu on the left hand side.
- Expand your Infrastructure and look for the VM you wan’t to do a quick backup.
- Right-click this VM and choose “Quick backup”.
You’re done. That is it.
There will be only a small notification that Quick backup started now for this particular VM:
But… Yes there’s a “but”. You can use Quick backup only for a VM, when this VM is already protected by an existing backup job. As mentioned in the helpcenter quote above, for a Quick backup there is no need to create an additional backup job. That’s because Veeam Backup & Replication does a check if the VM is already protected, and then triggers this job, but only to backup the specified VM.
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