File Level backups with non-BitLocker disk encryption

[deebee]

I opened a ticket last week (#00915615) asking about volume-level backups for clients with Checkpoint Disk Encryption installed and the short answer was, it's not currently supported, and I understand that's likely to be the case for the foreseeable future given it's a bit of a niche and there are other much more important features that people want.

I understand BitLocker is supported but there are some machines in the school (read: place with low budgets) which don't have a TPM and are therefore tricky to use BitLocker on unless we want to use startup keys on USB sticks (which we don't).

On one of the clients with Checkpoint Disk Encryption installed I installed Veeam and set up a file-level backup of the C:\Users directory to backup the user files. Obviously that means I can't do a BMR, but that's less of an issue than them losing their files. The client completed it's first backup quite happily, but for some reason all the subsequent ones are having a real problem completing with VSS errors coming up...

Code: Select all

Creating VSS snapshot Error: Failed to create snapshot: Backup job failed. Cannot create a shadow copy of the volumes containing writer's data. VSS asynchronous operation is not completed. Operation: [Shadow copies commit]. Code: [0x80042306]. 

After a clean reboot however, the machine will actually complete a backup successfully, provided the backup is run pretty rapidly after startup, so obviously Veeam CAN do the backups, something must just be stopping it after the machine has been on for a while..

While I realise there may be no immediate way to do a full volume backup, it feels like its SO close to being able to do file-level that it'd be 'good enough' for us for now. It would be really great if something could be done to allow file-level to work properly.

I've verified this one two different machines too so it's not just some quirk on the first machine I tried.

I'm opening up another ticket explaining I'm just after file-level and will update when I have the ticket number.

Edit: New case is #00922560

[Mike Resseler]

David,

please create that support case and if you haven't done it yet, put the link to this thread into it for further clearance.

But since you have a machine with checkpoint disk now, could you please do an entire backup instead of a file-level backup. Considering it works differently than file-level, I kind of feel it is going to work. I don't know checkpoint as a solution, but I have heard from someone else that it worked with another type of encryption solution

Mike

PS: starting from windows 8 you can actually use Bitlocker without TPM and without USB... It does require a startup passphrase

[deebee]

Hi Mike,

The old ticket (#00915615) was about problems with full-backup failing. Whole-machine backups fail completely - not even the recovery partition gets done. I've also tried image-based only selecting C: and it gives the same result as whole-machine.

The new ticket number (#00922560) which I added a few minutes ago which is relevant to this thread deals with the file-level not working correctly.

File-level completes without fail first-time and after a reboot, but fails every other time with the VSS error in the first post.

File level is the only one that worked at all - it's seems that it's just the ongoing backups which are the issue where they fail to create the VSS snapshots for some reason. It's the same behaviour on two machines with Checkpoint installed - one has AV installed and one without it.

[Mike Resseler]

David,

thanks, keep us posted

Mike