What happens if the metadata for offloaded VBKs is gone?

[wa15]

Let's say we have capacity-tier enabled for long-term archival of some VBKs. When the data from VBK is offloaded to the cloud, only metadata remains on the Veeam repository/server. What happens if the Veeam server crashes and everything needs to be built from scratch? Would Veeam rebuild that Metadata by downloading it from S3 Cloud once the Veeam configuration is imported from a backup?

[adelino]

I believe a second copy of the metadata is in the Capacity tier as well? If that goes away then I believe you are in trouble?

[Gostev]

That is correct.

So those stub backup files in Veeam backup repository are dispensable, their primary role is to serve as local metadata cache to improve performance and reduce API costs. You can delete one, and see it automatically re-created after scale-out backup repository rescan using a copy of metadata from Capacity Tier. This also means that you can import backups from object storage to the brand new Veeam installation... there's no need to restore the backup server configuration even.