With version 10 and 11 of the Veeam plugin for Oracle RMAN was a new backup metadata format introduced.

But what is the benefit of the new metadata format?
In the older versions all metadata was written to one file – the “Veaam backup chain metadata file” (Extension of this file is .vbm).

This file gets rather big over time and it takes some time to read and write the metadata for a single backup session from or to this file. Because of this the amount of time needed for a plugin backup session gets longer and longer.

The new metadata format writes the metadata of a backup session in an own file (Extension of these files is .vasm). Now you have many small metadata files. If a backup file expires, the metadata has not to be searched in the big file and deleted from it. Now the metadata file can simply be deleted with the backup file. This is much faster than the former procedure. Additionally a new small file is written for the backup chain with some general metadata information (Extension of this file is .vacm).

OK, that’s the theory. Now have a look at the update process…

In the log messages of Plugin Backup Jobs, a message is shown “Backup metadata is not up to date. Please upgrade the backup.”

And under Backups --> Disk --> Oracle RMAN in the Veeam console is an icon with an upward arrow shown for the affected backup chains.

Both indicate that a metadata update for this backup is needed.

To start the update, go to Backups --> Disk --> Oracle RMAN in the Veeam console and select the backup chain you want to update.

In the case you get the following error message, disable the corresponding backup job and start the update process once again.

The backups will be locked in the time the update is carried out. The corresponding backup job is disabled anyway, so this should be no problem…

Select yes to proceed.

Now the backup files are analyzed, and the metadata file is split into the smaller files for each backup file. This takes several minutes. I have done this process for several plugin backup chains with numbers of files between 12.000 and 18.000 files, the process was done in 4 to 6 minutes.

After the process is finished the metadata is migrated into the new format and a lot of small metadata files are created.

In my case there were 12.444 files before the update process and 24891 files after the update. The number of files roughly doubles.

After the update process is finished, don’t forget to reenable the corresponding backup job!

First backups after the updates reasonable faster than before. This is a full backup of a rather big database. The runtime is nearly one third after the update….

Before the update:

After the update: