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What is Health Check?

A health check is a planned process within a backup or backup copy job that helps ensure the data integrity of the backup chain. When Veeam Backup & Replication initiates a health check, it performs a CRC check for metadata and a hash check on VM data blocks.

CRC Check stands for Cyclic Redundancy Check. It is an error detection algorithm used to check whether data is corrupted during transmission or storage. This algorithm calculates a CRC value from the sent data and adds this value to the end of the data. The receiving party calculates the same CRC value from the data it receives and compares it with the sent CRC value. If the two values ​​match, it means the data is transferred or stored intact.

 

 

Why Are Health Checks Important?

Health checks are important to ensure data consistency in the event of a disaster. Computers can make mistakes. The more systems interact with each other, the greater the chance of errors occurring. When performing a backup, Veeam communicates with many different components, including but not limited to Veeam services, one or more storage locations, hypervisors, and network infrastructure. Sometimes data corruption can occur during this communication or due to a glitch in the hardware hosting the backup chain. Health checks are designed to reduce this and ensure that the backup chain is available when it is time to restore. Combined with regular testing, you can have peace of mind knowing that the restore will go as smoothly as possible.

How Often Should I Do Health Checks?

When enabled, health checks occur on the last Friday of each month by default. This can be changed to a different week or even a specific day of the week. Alternatively, checks can be carried out weekly. At a minimum, health checks should be performed monthly, but weekly checks are recommended for business-critical workloads, especially if outsourced.

Activating Veeam Health Check

 

  • First, go to the Backup Job where you will activate Health Check.
  • After going to Job > Edit > Storage tab, the Advanced option opens as shown in the image.

 

On the screen that appears, "Perform backup files health check" is activated in the Maintenance section.
You can also set a schedule for health check with Configure.

Great post on a nice feature in Veeam. 👍

Great post on a nice feature in Veeam. 👍

Thank u Chris. We continue to contribute so that people can use these beautiful features. 

 

 

 

@tarik.yenisey, thanks for the post.

I am a bit confused about how often to run the health check and which backups get checked.
Currently, my laptop is running vagent which is managed by VBR.

The current setup is each time the agent runs, it does the health check so i know the latest backup is not corrupted.

As I travel with the laptop, in a road-warrior mode over tailscale, the health check takes multiple times longer to run then the actual backup.
This causes problems, as I can simply run a quick backup backup, hibernate the laptop and move on.

Given the backup files are in a backup repository, not understanding why the VBR itself, cannot run the health checks? is there is something wrong with my config of the VBR?

So I know that I can run health checks on a schedule, let’s say once a week.
As I understand it, in the case, only one backup file is checked per week, instead of checking every backup file. which if true, is sub-optimal.

I have also read this post

I would like to note that:

  1. the backup repositories are stored on a windows server 2022 using REFS file system with three hard drives.
  2. once a month, a scheduled task run REFS data integrity scan

I am looking for advice about all this?

  1. I would expect VBR to do the health check, not my laptop over a slow internet connection?
  2. Am i being overly paranoid about all this?

Thanks, David

 

 

 

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