There are three backup types that Veeam uses:
Full Backup
A full backup to a VBK file is where at least one file is used for full block copies for virtual machines. Multiple VMs can also be stored in one backup.
Incremental Backup
An incremental backup to VIB files copies only the blocks of data that have changed since the last incremental backup. For a restore of the data at a certain point of time it needs the correct sequence from the last VBK Full Backup with all incremental VIB files.
Synthetic Full Backup
The synthetic full backup is created by reading the full backup contained in the VBK file and the incremental backups to create a full backup file. To restore the data, you only need the last synthetic full backup.
What else should you consider when setting up your Veeam backup?
The security of the backed up virtual machines as well as the location where the Veeam backups are stored are influenced by other factors such as:
Storage Management
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- NAS Setup
- Microsoft Storage Spaces
- Microsoft Deduplication
- Microsoft Dynamic Disk / LDM (Logical Disk Manager)
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Storage
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- Virtual Machines like VMWare VMDK- or Microsoft Hyper-V VHD/VHDX files
- Raid Arrays and LUNs
- iSCSI files
- NAS Systems through network share
- Block storage
- LTO or other Tape media
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File Systems
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- Microsoft NTFS + ReFS
- NetApp WAFL
- Linux EXT3/EXT4 + BTRFS are the usual NAS filesystems
- SAN Systems use proprietary file system setups
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