File inclusions and exclusions in Veeam Backup & Replication

A few years ago, the file exclusion engine was introduced to Veeam Backup & Replication. This was primarily meant to handle situations such as a large set file data that you didn’t need in an image-based backup. One example I had users liked was a SQL Server (especially before Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SQL Server) that had SQL Server DBAs performing SQL Server Agent jobs or SQL Server Maintenance Plans to export flat backups on disk and transaction log exports.

With the file exclusion, Veeam could optionally take the image-based backup of the VM running SQL Server and exclude the disk geometry that stored the files specified in the backup job. This is an extension of the same logic used in the backup job to exclude the swap file.

The other half of this capability is the file inclusion. This becomes very interesting as it can be very useful for giving parts of a VM the opportunity to have additional RPOs in addition to that of a regular Veeam backup job that takes the whole image. The figure below shows where you can set a file inclusion:

Read the entire article here, File inclusions and exclusions in Veeam Backup & Replication

via the fine folks at Veeam Software