Disable CBT on Veeam jobs via PowerShell

If you haven’t heard the not so great news, VMware has discovered a bug  in vSphere 6 with Change Block Tracking (CBT) that can cause your backups to be corrupt and therefore invalid.  Currently, they are recommending not to use CBT with vSphere 6 when backing up your VMs.

I was looking for an easy way to disable this on all jobs in Veeam quickly via PowerShell, but it’s not obvious how to do that, so I took some time to figure it out.  Here it is assuming the module is loaded in your PowerShell session.

$backupjobs = get-vbrjob | where jobtype -eq "Backup"
foreach ($job in $backupjobs){
$joboptions = $job | get-vbrjoboptions
$joboptions.visourceoptions.UseChangeTracking = $false
$job | set-vbrjoboptions -options $joboptions
}

Here’s now to enable it again:

$backupjobs = get-vbrjob | where jobtype -eq "Backup"
foreach ($job in $backupjobs){
$joboptions = $job | get-vbrjoboptions
$joboptions.visourceoptions.UseChangeTracking = $true
#$joboptions.visourceoptions.EnableChangeTracking = $true
$job | set-vbrjoboptions -options $joboptions
}

Sorry it’s not pretty on the page, but I wanted to get this out ASAP to help anyone needing to do this quickly and effectively.

One thing to note is in the enable script, there’s a commented line out.  If you have already set your jobs manually and wish to use the script to enable CBT again, be aware that the option to enable CBT within VMware if it is turned off gets disabled if you turn CBT off altogether within the job setup.  If you disable CBT with my script, that doesn’t get touched, so you don’t need to remove the # on that line.   If you want that option enabled again, take out the # before that line, and it’ll enable that option again.

Hope this helps!

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