Guest processing on Veeam

[browolf]

Currently every night, veeam backs up VMs in a sequence of jobs

 

VCSA, linux VMs, windows VMs, D: drives of VMS e.g. user areas,

 

I noticed that the windows VM job is using "guest file system indexing"

 

On reflection I'm not sure that we'd ever need to 1click restore an individual file on a c: drive though 1 of these VMs is an SQL server but it's data is backed up in the ddrive backup so if something did happen to a vm I'd likely just restore the whole thing.

 

What's best practice here. ?

[howartp]

We have guest file indexing on everything.

 

The one time you think you won't need a file restoring from C: is the time something goes wrong such as Unifi controller or CardExchange server which puts its config files in non-standard places and you haven't realised.

[MatthewL]

We guest file index all our windows servers, Linux not as we get a few issues. Some servers its just easy to restore the VM and pull the file off that way, we use files more on our file servers than others think the only time files and folders get restored on the majority of application ones are when doing testing! All depends on your needs and do you have access to restore a full VM if needed?

[lmgtfy]

The indexing is used just for advanced reports and speeds up searching in a backup I believe.

 

We don't have it on as it tends to add a lot of time to the backups for us. You can still do single file level restores without it.

[Steve21]

As above really. We don't use it as all the big servers adds an age to the backups if you have a lot of files, and isn't needed for FLRs

 

It's only really useful if no-one knows where a file was, and generally even in that case I find it's easier to use the "Open In Explorer" option as part of the restore and search in that, which doesn't require it being turned on in the backup, rather than have it slowing down each backup

 

But obviously each to their own, and no doubt depends on your usage case

 

Steve