Veeam Quick Backup with PowerShell

Veeam Quick Backup lets you run ad-hoc, application-aware backups of individual VMs or groups of VMs without touching your regular backup schedule. It’s built for situations like patching a server or making a risky change, where you want a fresh recovery point right now rather than whenever the next scheduled job runs.

This post covers the Quick Backup feature and how to use it with PowerShell, so you can fold it into your existing scripts and automation.

Why Use Quick Backups?

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Quick backups enable you to run ad-hoc backups of one or more VMs without running the entire backup job they are part of. This can be particularly useful for backing up a machine before patching, making a major change, or restoring a previous recovery point.

You might be thinking, “But I can just use a VM snapshot for that!” Unlike VM snapshots, quick backups are application-aware¹, providing a more reliable recovery point. Additionally, quick backups can help keep a VM updated in preparation for using Veeam’s Instant Recovery capabilities, such as migrating to another platform, like moving from VMware to Hyper-V.

Prerequisites

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To perform a quick backup, the following requirements must be met:

• A backup job processing the VM exists on the backup server.
• A full backup file for the VM exists in the backup repository configured in the backup infrastructure.

NOTE: You cannot perform a quick backup for VMware Cloud Director VMs processed with VMware Cloud Director jobs². Attempting this will result in an error in both the UI and PowerShell:

Error in PowerShell:
Start-VBRQuickBackup : Failed to perform quick backup for VM TestVM01-LFuO. Reason: VM is not added to any job or full backup not found At line:1 char:1
+ Start-VBRQuickBackup -VM $VM -Verbose
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+ CategoryInfo : InvalidOperation: (:) [Start-VBRQuickBackup], Exception
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : QuickBackupErrorId,Veeam.Backup.PowerShell.Cmdlets.StartVBRQuickBackup

Getting started

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Now that we’ve established why you might want to use quick backups and what you need to get started, let’s dive in.

First, select the VM or VMs you want to back up using Find-VBRViEntity for VMware VMs or Find-VBRHvEntity for Hyper-V VMs.

# Single VM called TestVM01
$VMs = Find-VBRViEntity -Name TestVM01
# Add an additional VM called DC01
$VMs += Find-VBRViEntity -Name DC01
# Or Select all VMs starting with DC0
$VMs = Find-VBRViEntity -Name DC0*

Next, kick off Start-VBRQuickBackup and pass it the VMs you want to back up.

# Start a quick backup job
Start-VBRQuickBackup -VM $VMs
# Start a quick backup job but wait for it finish
Start-VBRQuickBackup -VM $VMs -Wait

It’s as easy as that! The -Wait switch is useful if you’re using this as part of a script and don’t want to proceed to the next step, such as installing Windows Updates, until the backup is complete.

Demo

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Here’s a quick backup in action. Feel free to pause and copy/paste the commands right from the recording!

What about retention

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Now that you’ve created your backups, how do they fit into your retention policy, and when will they be removed?

When you perform a quick backup, it creates a single VM incremental restore point. Unlike a regular backup that contains data for all VMs in a job, a single VM incremental restore point contains data only for a specific VM.

A single VM restore point is not considered a full-fledged restore point in the backup chain. From the retention policy perspective, a single VM restore point is grouped with a regular restore point following it. When Veeam needs to delete a single VM restore point by retention, it waits for the next regular restore point to expire, effectively increasing the retention by one restore point for some time. After the next regular restore point expires, Veeam will clean up two restore points at once.

For example, if you have a backup job that runs at 3 AM, with a 3-day retention and a synthetic full backup every Sunday and Wednesday:

On Tuesday, you need to apply some patches to a server, so you perform a quick backup at 5 PM. This backup will be grouped with the next regular backup, which will be the Wednesday full backup, and will expire on Sunday instead of Saturday, along with the regular incremental from Tuesday.

Wrapping up

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That’s quick backups using PowerShell. Hopefully, this has shown just how easy it can be to include ad-hoc backups into your workflows, so you don’t have to rely solely on VM snapshots.

For more information, I recommend visiting the Veeam Help Center for the latest updates.