Tutorials
How to Create a Backup Job in Veeam Backup & Replication (2026)
The complete wizard walkthrough for VMware VMs — plus the retention and scheduling settings pros actually use.
Veeam Backup & Replication remains the go-to for protecting virtual machines in 2026. Creating a backup job is the fundamental task everything else builds on — get it right once and your data is safe on autopilot. This guide walks through the current console, step by step.
Before you start
- Veeam Backup & Replication installed and licensed
- Your VMware vSphere hosts and a backup repository already added to the console
- Admin credentials for vSphere and enough free space in the repository
Creating the job
- Open the New Backup Job wizard. In the Veeam console, go to the Home view, right-click Jobs, and choose Backup → Virtual Machine → VMware vSphere.
- Name it clearly. Use a descriptive name like
VMware_Production_Dailyand add a short description. Future-you will thank present-you at 3 AM during an incident. - Pick what to back up. Click Add and select VMs — or better, add a container (folder, resource pool, or cluster) so new VMs are picked up automatically. Use Exclusions to skip anything you don't need.
- Set storage and retention. Choose your backup repository, then set the retention policy — the number of restore points to keep. Seven points = one week of daily backups. Open Advanced for backup mode (incremental is the usual choice), compression, and encryption.
- Configure guest processing (recommended). Enable application-aware processing for VMs running databases like SQL Server or Exchange so backups are transactionally consistent. Supply guest OS credentials with admin rights.
- Schedule it. Tick Run the job automatically and pick a schedule — nightly at off-peak hours (e.g. 10 PM) suits most shops. Leave retry failed VM processing enabled (3 retries is the sensible default).
- Review and finish. Check the summary. Tick Run the job when I click Finish if you want the first backup to start immediately.
- Verify. After the first run, confirm restore points landed in the repository — and actually test a restore (Instant VM Recovery or file-level restore). An untested backup is just a hope.
Pro tip: follow the 3-2-1 ruleKeep 3 copies of important data, on 2 different media, with 1 copy off-site. A Veeam backup copy job to a secondary repository (or cloud) covers the off-site part with almost no extra effort.
Worth enabling
- GFS retention — Grandfather-Father-Son keeps weekly, monthly, and yearly points for long-term archiving.
- Email notifications — set them in the job summary so failures reach you instead of sitting silently.
- VMware tags — tag VMs (e.g.
backup:daily) and include by tag for self-maintaining jobs.
Frequently asked questions
Incremental or reverse incremental?
Forward incremental with periodic synthetic or active fulls is the modern default — faster daily runs and simpler restores. Reverse incremental writes more I/O to the repository on every run.
How much space do I need?
Plan for the full backup size plus roughly 10–20% per incremental restore point, times your retention count. Compression typically shrinks Windows VMs by about half.
Should I encrypt backups?
Yes if they ever leave your building — especially for backup copy jobs to cloud storage. Store the encryption password in a password manager, not in a sticky note.
Conclusion
A solid backup job is eight wizard screens and ten minutes of your day. The part most people skip — testing the restore — is the part that matters most. Schedule it, monitor it, and sleep better.