This blog post was inspired by an excellent article that explores recovery scenarios beyond the typical restoration approaches often covered.
In-place upgrades represent the standard and vendor-recommended approach for advancing Veeam Backup & Replication (VBR) to newer releases, ensuring continuity of configuration, and retention of job etc without requiring a full reinstallation. But without a test lab, you are essentially performing a high-wire act.
While everyone talks about restoring data during “World Backup Day”, few share stories of how protecting the protector. Veeam’s own configuration backup can literally rescue your Veeam Backup and Replication (VBR) when an upgrade goes sideways. You can take a look at this Veeam kb2645.
Note: Exiting skips finalization steps that initialize IdentityService config, DB schemas, certs, and token dirs, leaving services “running” but incomplete leaves VBR unusable. Ensures you get the wizard that displays the completion of the upgrade.
Veeam do not recommend backing up the backup server configuration using backup jobs in Veeam Backup & Replication. This also includes the use of third-party tools or native Microsoft SQL or PostgreSQL database backups. Simply put, the only supported method for protecting the configuration of Veeam Backup & Replication is to use the native Configuration Backup tool.
Therefore, when a Veeam Backup Server is lost, a new machine should be set up, Veeam Backup & Replication installed, and a Configuration Restore performed to recover all settings from the previous Veeam Backup Server to the new deployment. This is exactly what this post covers regardless of the incident type.
This content represents a subset of the full article. For comprehensive details and complete context, please refer to the original publication: https://techdirectarchive.com/2026/04/04/world-backup-day-v13-upgrade-failure-veeam-configuration-backup-saved-the-day/
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