Recovery Verification for Veeam Agent Backups

Veeam Backup & Replication offers the SureBackup technology to test backups and check if you can recover data from them. You can verify any restore point of a backed-up computer protected with Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows and Veeam Agent for Linux.

During a SureBackup job, Veeam Backup & Replication performs “live” verification: creates a virtual machine using the backup of a physical machine, scans backed-up data for malware, boots VM from the backup in the isolated environment, runs tests for the VM, powers the VM off and creates a report on recovery verification results. To learn more about the logic behind SureBackup, see the How SureBackup Works section in the Veeam Backup & Replication User Guide.

Before creating the SureBackup job, check limitations for Veeam Agent backups below. Then learn how to prepare your backup infrastructure and create a SureBackup job in Creating SureBackup Job.

General Limitations

For backups created with Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows or Veeam Agent for Linux, SureBackup has the following limitations:

• SureBackup is not supported for backup files created by backup copy jobs.
• SureBackup is not supported for backups containing drives greater than 64 TB.
• SureBackup is not supported if the Microsoft Windows system partition and boot partition of the backed-up computer are located on different drives.

• SureBackup is not supported for backups stored on the Veeam Cloud Connect repository.

• If you plan to verify computer recovery with VMware vSphere, consider the following:

• SureBackup is not supported for backups of 4 KB sector drives.
• SureBackup is not supported for backups of storage spaces.
• SureBackup is not supported for backups containing more than 54 drives.

Limitations for backups created with Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows

For backups created with Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows, SureBackup has the following limitations:

• You must use volume-level backup of the protected computer. File-level backups are not supported. To learn more about backup types, see the Backup Types section in the Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows User Guide.
• SureBackup is not supported for failover clusters.

• If you plan to verify computer recovery with Microsoft Hyper-V, SureBackup is not supported for application groups with computers connected to different networks.

Limitations for backups created with Veeam Agent for Linux

For backups created with Veeam Agent for Linux, SureBackup has the following limitations:

• The backed-up computer must run one of the following OSes:

• Debian 10.13 – 11.6
• Ubuntu 16.04, 18.04, 20.04, 22.04, 22.10
• RHEL 6.3 – 9.1
• CentOS 7

For other Linux distributions, the successful recovery verification is not guaranteed.

• If you want Veeam Backup & Replication to connect the recovered VM to the virtual network, the protected computer must run one of the following OSes:

• Ubuntu 16.04, 18.04, 20.04, 22.04
• RHEL 6.3 – 9.1

Besides the OS, one of the following configuration utilities must be installed on the protected computer:

• Netplan
• NetworkManager
• sysconfig

• You must use volume-level backup of the protected computer. File-level backups are not supported. To learn more about backup types, see the Backup Types section in the Veeam Agent for Linux User Guide.