Hey Checkyourlogs fans, today I encountered a very weird error when attempting to take an incremental backup of a SQL Server using the Veeam Agent for Windows. When running the job, it would immediately fail with an error message that said: “Failed to load backup meta from file: Blah veeam Backup.vbk.” This was a very interesting error message because I had just completed a full backup earlier that morning.

Here was the error message from the Veeam Console.


Digging in the UI told me to have a look at the logs for more details.

So, I went to the default log location on my Veeam Server “C:\Programdata\Veeam\Backup\<JOBNAME>

Inside the logfile, I could see that there was an error message that said failed to open the backup file. I originally thought that the issue was caused by the Repository being offline.


Next, I went to my Backup Repository and had a look, and I could see that the backup file was there.


My VBK and VIB files were there and online. I remember reading that if Deduplication Jobs are running on Veeam Backup Target Volumes that Replicas and Backups could fail. So I decided to check if there were any Deduplication Jobs running at this time.

Indeed, there was a Deduplication Optimization pass occurring right at this time. I decided to kill the deduplication job by running get-dedupjob | stop-dedupjob. The Backup Target was running Windows Server 2019 with Deduplication Enabled.


Last I started the backup again and this time with success.


I hope this blog post saves you a ton of time.

Thanks,


Dave