Among the several features of Veeam Backup & Replication, there is one of them probably unknown to 99.99% of its users, basically because it’s a tool usually executed only by the technical support staff. It’s the Validator, a small command line tool located into the installation folder of the software:
Its main use case is to verify the consistency of a backup created with Veeam Backup & Replication. It’s NOT SureBackup, that does another kind of control by starting the VM from the backup file, and is for sure more reliable. But if you do not want to start a SureBackup activity, or if you only have a Standard license lacking SureBackup, this tool can be a good alternative, or you can use it to check a backup file after it has been moved or if you had a consistency problem on the storage holding those files.
Its use is pretty easy, as you can see in its help menu:
The biggest prerequisite is that the backup file needs to be registered into the Veeam Server. So, you cannot simply run the tool against a backup file. Once you had identified the Job and the desired Restore Point you want to verify, you only need to run the tool with a couple of parameterers among those available. The tool will start checking all the files comprised in a backup:
Obviously, the most of the time will be used to check the virtual disk of the virtual machine. Once the check is complete, the final result will appear:
If the content of the backup is valid, at least you will be able to exclude the file as a possible problem, and you can investigate somewhere else. If the result is negative, probably the backup file is corrupted.