VEEAM file and folder versions restore

[petben]

Looking at VEEAM, I’ve installed the Backup and Replication server but restore seems unfriendly.

 

I’m sure VM backup will be good but Most of our restore jobs are looking for a students deleted file, but they don’t usually know when it was deleted. The only way I can see VEEAM working is you choose the restore date first, then the file to restore, if you want to look at another restore date you need to redo the steps, resetting the view and folder path you are searching. Some of the files may be 20 subfolders down. Is there a way to see all the versions available of a file or folder?

 

Looked at the enterprise manager and indexing but that’s still all about selecting the backup first.

 

Maybe VEEAM isn’t the answer....

[andyire]

Could you setup windows “Previous Versions” and enable users to self restore deleted files etc? Then use veeam as dr protection. I would recommend veeam as a backup product and the support tends to be quite good.

[petben]

Thanks, its a shame VEEAM restore is so backwards. No other way then?

 

we already have dpm setup and previous versions which works well, but that sadly does not work on 2016. You’re right will probably do for now. Will use VEEAM for VM backup locally, Do you do anything to connect VEEAM to cloud backup, I think they don’t have their own you need to buy a 3rd party cloud space, any recommendations? 1TB for DR.

[andyire]

Not that I’m aware of. We have the essentials subscription. There may be some more functionality in the enterprise version which I’m not familiar with though . I wouldn’t really consider VEEAM restore ‘backward’, but it would be excellent feature to have a previous versions type restore option. Pick a file and look at its version history etc. Veeam restore does have great features like instant VM recovery, where you can actually boot a server from a backup file etc. Also the application aware stuff, allowing just restore of SQL database , or even individual Active Directory objects without doing a full server restore are great.

 

You could maybe use rsync (it’s a linux thing- but can get it for windows). Can use file level backup, which can be set to take the deltas etc. Used to use this for file level offsite backups. Once setup, you could just browse to the backup share using UNC path and then browse the folder for each backup date. Not quite as seamless as ‘VSS’ and “Previous Versions”, but it works. I thought previous versions could still work in server 2016, with only w10 having the changes to it?

 

“File History” feature looks like it could help, but not quite the same as vss and co.

 

The other alternative is to move to something like 0365 or GSuite. Both have file restore for docs which are kept within their ecosystem. There are limitations with each which you would need to assess before deciding though.

 

I haven’t been using VEEAM in conjunction with cloud connect, but this is due to the LEA currently offering more storage for a more affordable price. We have just setup a SMB share (which is hosted by the LEA) as a repository in our VEEAM. We then run a backupCopy job to protect a few critical servers. We currently use about 4TB.

Additional to this and our main backup server , we also run a full copy of our backups to another building in the school stored to disk on a synology NAS.

 

Cloud connect is usually provided by 3rd parties. Not 100% certain, but I think you can pay for your own license as an alternative and copy back to a HQ Datacenter etc for really large scale setups. In terms of 3rd party providers can’t remember the name of who I looked at before but there are quite a few across the country. I think you can find a list of suppliers on VEEAM website. Pricing will vary etc. Providers usually offer the option of sending your backups via USB disk etc in the first instance for the initial seeding, but it is worth bearing in mind your bandwidth if you intend to use offsite backups .

 

If you estimate 1TB for offsite DR stuff, this would probably be achievable in terms of cost/space. When I looked at pricing about 18months ago, I was seeing ballpark pricing of about £3k for about 3tb. This is probably quite out of date now though. There are lots of different ways to achieve offsite backups though. RedStore are another option, which I have heard good things about.

[petben]

Hey thanks for the detailed reply. I think to minimise systems I’ll try to cloud connect with a 3rd party.

 

Last VEEAM Q, backing up whole VMs is great but what about a VM which contains folder shares that we want to backup more often. E.g. our finance server has databases we want to backup everyday.

 

Do you just backup the whole VM everyday (seems wasteful of reousrces) or setup a VM backup job and somehow exclude things we don’t need, or buy a server agent license and setup a backup job of the databases within the VM itself?

 

Thanks for ur help.