Veeam Backup Validator: check the consistency of your backup files

0 Flares Twitter 0 Facebook 0 LinkedIn 0 Email -- 0 Flares ×

Among the several features of Veeam Backup & Replication, there is one of them probably unknown to 99.99% of its users, basically because it’s a tool usually executed only by the technical support staff. It’s the Validator, a small command line tool located into the installation folder of the software:

Veeam Validator binary

Its main use case is to verify the consistency of a backup created with Veeam Backup & Replication. It’s NOT SureBackup, that does another kind of control by starting the VM from the backup file, and is for sure more reliable. But if you do not want to start a SureBackup activity, or if you only have a Standard license lacking SureBackup, this tool can be a good alternative, or you can use it to check a backup file after it has been moved or if you had a consistency problem on the storage holding those files.

Its use is pretty easy, as you can see in its help menu:

Veeam Validator Help Menu

The biggest prerequisite is that the backup file needs to be registered into the Veeam Server. So, you cannot simply run the tool against a backup file. Once you had identified the Job and the desired Restore Point you want to verify, you only need to run the tool with a couple of parameterers among those available. The tool will start checking all the files comprised in a backup:

Veeam Validator running

Obviously, the most of the time will be used to check the virtual disk of the virtual machine. Once the check is complete, the final result will appear:

Veeam Validator result

If the content of the backup is valid, at least you will be able to exclude the file as a possible problem, and you can investigate somewhere else. If the result is negative, probably the backup file is corrupted.