Maintenance Settings

You can specify maintenance settings for a backup chain created with the Veeam Agent backup job. Maintenance operations help make sure that the backup chain remains valid and consistent.

Maintenance settings are available for the following types of Veeam Agent backup jobs that process Linux computers:

  • Backup job managed by the backup server.
  • Backup job managed by Veeam Agent (backup policy). For backup jobs of this type, maintenance settings are available only if the job is targeted at a Veeam backup repository.

To specify maintenance settings for the backup job:

  1. At the Storage step of the wizard, click Advanced.
  2. Click the Maintenance tab.
  3. [For backup jobs managed by the backup server] To periodically perform a health check for the latest restore point in the backup chain, in the Storage-level corruption guard section select the Perform backup files health check check box and click Configure to specify the time schedule for the health check.

An automatic health check can help you avoid a situation where a restore point gets corrupted, making all dependent restore points corrupted, too. If during the health check Veeam Backup & Replication detects corrupted data blocks in the latest restore point in the backup chain (or the restore point before the latest one if the latest restore point is incomplete), it will start the health check retry and transport valid data blocks from the protected computer to the Veeam backup repository. The transported data blocks are stored to a new backup file or the latest backup file in the backup chain, depending on the data corruption scenario. For more information, see the Health Check for Backup Files section in the Veeam Backup & Replication User Guide.

NOTE

The Defragment and compact full backup file option is not available for backup jobs targeted at object storage. For object storage, Veeam Agent offers a special health check mechanism as default. To run the health check for object storage, enable the Perform backup files health check option in the Storage-level corruption guard section and specify the health check schedule.

You can also switch from the health check for object storage to the standard health check. To do so, select the Verify content of each object in backup check box in the backup job settings. Keep in mind that enabling this setting may result in additional charges from your object storage provider.

For more information, see the Health Check for Object Storage section in the Veeam Agent for Linux User Guide.

  1. Select the Remove deleted items data after check box and specify the number of days for which you want to keep the backup created with the backup job in the target location.
  • For backup jobs managed by the backup server, deleted items retention policy is similar to retention policy for deleted VMs. After you remove a protection group or individual computer from a Veeam Agent backup job, Veeam Backup & Replication will keep its data on the backup repository for the period that you have specified. When this period is over, backup data of this computer will be removed from the backup repository. For more information, see the Retention Policy for Deleted Items section in the Veeam Backup & Replication User Guide.
  • For backup jobs managed by Veeam Agent, if Veeam Agent does not create new restore points for the backup, the backup will remain in the target location for the period that you have specified. When this period is over, the backup will be removed from the target location. For more information, see the Veeam Agent for Linux User Guide.

By default, the deleted items data retention period is 30 days. Do not set the deleted items retention period to 1 day or a similar short interval. In the opposite case, the backup job may work not as expected and remove data that you still require.

  1. [For backup jobs managed by the backup server] To periodically compact a full backup, select the Defragment and compact full backup file check box and click Configure to specify the schedule for the compact operation.

NOTE

The Defragment and compact full backup file option is not available for backup jobs targeted at object storage.

During the compact operation, Veeam Backup & Replication creates a new empty file and copies to it data blocks from the full backup file. As a result, the full backup file gets defragmented and the speed of reading and writing from/to the backup file increases.

If the full backup file contains data blocks for deleted items (protection groups or individual computers), Veeam Backup & Replication will remove these data blocks. For more information, see the Compact of Full Backup File section in the Veeam Backup & Replication User Guide.

Maintenance SettingsNOTE

Consider the following:

  • If you want to periodically compact a full backup, you must make sure that you have enough free space in the target location. For the compact operation, the amount of free space must be equal to or more that the size of the full backup file.
  • In contrast to the compact operation for a VM backup, during compact of a full Veeam Agent backup file, Veeam Backup & Replication does not perform the data take out operation. If the full backup file contains data for a machine that has only one restore point and this restore point is older than 7 days, Veeam Backup & Replication will not extract data for this machine to a separate full backup file.

Maintenance Settings