Step 3. Select Backup Mode

At the Backup mode step of the wizard, select the mode in which you want to create a backup:

Select the necessary backup mode. You can select one of the following options:

Entire machine — select this option if you want to create a backup of the entire computer image. When you restore data from such backup, you will be able to recover the entire computer image as well as data on specific computer volumes: files, folders, application data and so on. With this option selected, you will pass to the Destination step of the wizard.
Volume level backup — select this option if you want to create a backup of specific computer volumes, for example, the system volume. When you restore data from such backup, you will be able to recover data on these volumes only: files, folders, application data and so on. With this option selected, you will pass to the Volumes step of the wizard.
File level backup — select this option if you want to create a backup of individual directories on your computer. With this option selected, you will pass to the Files step of the wizard.

[For file-level backup] If you want to perform backup in the snapshot-less mode, select Disable snapshot. With this option selected, Veeam Agent will not create a snapshot of the backed-up volumes during backup. This allows Veeam Agent to back up data residing in file systems that are not supported for snapshot-based backup with Veeam Agent. To learn more, see Snapshot-Less File-Level Backup.

Step 3. Select Backup Mode IMPORTANT

Consider the following:

[For entire machine backup] Certain limitations for Dell PowerPath configuration apply. To learn more, see this Veeam KB article.
[For volume-level backup] Volume-level backup job relies on a device name in the /dev directory. Device names in the /dev directory (for example, /dev/md-127, /dev/dm-1) must stay persistent for backed-up volumes. Otherwise, the job will back up the wrong volume.
[For file-level backup] If the backed-up file system has a complex folder structure with many hierarchy levels, during incremental backup, the inbound network traffic on the Veeam Agent computer may exceed by far the outbound traffic. Significant amount of data can be transferred to the Veeam Agent computer from the target backup location even if few files are changed since the previous job session.

Step 3. Select Backup Mode TIP

File-level backup is typically slower than volume-level backup. If you plan to back up all folders with files on a specific volume, it is recommended that you configure volume-level backup instead of file-level backup.

Step 3. Select Backup Mode