Before You Begin

Before you create a backup job, check the following prerequisites:

• Backup infrastructure components that will take part in the backup process must be added to the backup infrastructure and properly configured. These include ESXi hosts on which VMs are registered, backup proxy and backup repository.
• The backup repository must have enough free space to store created backup files. To receive alerts about low space on the backup repository, configure global notification settings. For more information, see Specifying Other Notification Settings.
• For VM guest OS indexing on Linux-based VMs, a user account with root privileges on the VM is required. It is recommended that you create a separate user account for work with Veeam Backup & Replication on the Linux-based VM, grant root privileges to this account and specify settings of this account at the Guest Processing step of the New Backup Job wizard.
• If you plan to map a backup job to a backup file that already exists on the backup repository, you must perform the rescan operations for this backup repository. Otherwise, Veeam Backup & Replication will not be able to recognize backup files on the backup repository. For more information, see Rescanning Backup Repositories.
• If you plan to configure a secondary destination for the backup job, you can create a backup copy job or backup to tape job beforehand. The backup copy job or backup to tape job can have an empty source, that is, can be not linked to any backup job. For more information, see Creating Backup Copy Jobs and Creating Backup to Tape Jobs.
• If you plan to use pre-job and post-job scripts and/or pre-freeze and post-thaw scripts, you must create scripts before you configure the backup job.
• To back up Microsoft SQL transaction logs with Veeam Backup & Replication, you must make sure that the recovery model is set to Full or Bulk-logged recovery model for required databases on Microsoft SQL Server VMs. If the recovery model is set to Simple, Veeam Backup & Replication will not detect and process transaction logs on Microsoft SQL Server VMs.
• Veeam Backup & Replication excludes from application-aware processing Microsoft SQL databases that are mounted to the Microsoft SQL Server using a remote UNC path. If at least one file of the database is located on a network shared folder, this database will be backed up in the crash-consistent state. Other databases on this server will be backed up in the transactionally consistent state. For more information, see this Veeam KB article.
• By default, system databases (master, model, msdb) are skipped from transaction log processing and are not a part of the Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SQL Server restore workflow. To recover these databases, you can use file-level restore.

If you want to exclude other databases from the transaction log processing workflow, refer to this Veeam Knowledge Base article: this Veeam KB article. (Consider that exclusion configured this way will be treated as a global setting.)

• To back up Oracle transaction logs with Veeam Backup & Replication, you must make sure that ARCHIVELOG is turned on for required databases on Oracle VMs. If ARCHIVELOG is turned off, Veeam Backup & Replication will not detect and process transaction logs on Oracle VMs.

Mind the following:

• If you plan to periodically perform maintenance operations with backup files, mind the following limitations: Health Check for Backup Files, Retention Policy for Deleted VMs, Compact of Full Backup File.
• Due to Microsoft limitations, you cannot use Microsoft Azure Active Directory credentials to perform guest processing on VMs running Microsoft Windows 10.
• [For Dell EMC Data Domain backup repository] The length of forward incremental and forever forward incremental backup chains that contain one full backup and a set of subsequent incremental backups cannot be greater than 60 restore points. To overcome this limitation, schedule full backups (active or synthetic) to split the backup chain into shorter series. For example, to perform backups at 30-minute intervals, 24 hours a day, you must schedule synthetic fulls every day. In this scenario, intervals immediately after midnight may be skipped due to the duration of synthetic processing. For more information, see How Synthetic Full Backup Works.
• If you assign the role of a backup proxy to a VM, you should not add this VM to the list of processed VMs in a job that uses this backup proxy. Such configuration may result in degraded job performance. Veeam Backup & Replication will assign this backup proxy to process other VMs in the job first, and processing of this VM itself will be put on hold. Veeam Backup & Replication will report the following message in the job statistics: VM is a backup proxy, waiting for it to stop processing tasks. The job will start processing this VM only after the backup proxy deployed on the VM finishes its tasks.
• If you use tags to categorize virtual infrastructure objects, check limitations for VM tags. For more information, see VM Tags.
• Veeam Backup & Replication supports backup of Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and SQL Server databases existing in mount point volumes.