Quick Backup

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. Quick backup can be run for both incremental and reverse incremental backup chains.

Quick backup is an incremental backup task: Veeam Backup & Replication copies only changed data for selected VMs and saves this data to a new restore point in the backup chain. Similar to incremental backup, quick backup can only be run for VMs that have been successfully backed up at least once and have a full restore point. If there is no full restore point for a VM, quick backup cannot be performed.

Quick Backup

To perform a quick backup, Veeam Backup & Replication uses an existing backup job. When you start a quick backup task for a VM, Veeam Backup & Replication verifies that a backup job processing this VM exists on the backup server. If such a job is detected, Veeam Backup & Replication triggers a job and creates an incremental restore point for the VM. If a backup job for the VM does not exist, quick backup is terminated.

You can run a quick backup for one or multiple VMs simultaneously. If you start a quick backup for several VMs and these VMs are processed by different backup jobs, Veeam Backup & Replication triggers a set of backup jobs. Each triggered job creates a separate restore point and stores it in the correct backup chain.

In some cases, a VM may be processed by several backup jobs on the backup server. In this case, Veeam Backup & Replication starts the job that has created the most recent restore point for the VM.

For example, VM01 is processed by 2 jobs:

Backup job 1 created the most recent restore point on Monday
Backup job 2 created the most recent restore point on Tuesday

When you start a quick backup for VM01, Veeam Backup & Replication will trigger Backup job 2 to create a new incremental restore point.

Note

If the quick backup task overlaps the scheduled backup job, the backup job waits for the quick backup task to complete.

Limitations for Quick Backup

You cannot perform a quick backup for VMware Cloud Director VMs processed with VMware Cloud Director jobs. However, if you process a VMware Cloud Director VM with a regular backup job, you can switch to the Computer view and start the quick backup operation for this VM.