Host-based backup of VMware vSphere VMs.
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Peejay62
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Saving a specific restorepoint for retention purposes

Post by Peejay62 »

Hi,

This is the case, every now and then there is a demand for freezing/saving a specific restorepoint of a VM. For example a vm is not functioning well and one knows that at a specific moment it did (so the backup of that moment, let's say the version of 2 weeks ago, is very usefull). So I am asked to freeze that backup (even till further notice).
What I would really like to have is an option to easily perform that freeze. Changing the retention within the complete backupjob (map based backup) isn't preferred, I don't want to mess up the backupchain. Nowadays I save the vmfiles to a location and keep them there until no longer needed. But then you have some administration and in the case that you have to put the VM back tot that version (and the original backup has already expired in the meanwhile) that gives some additional work to do.
Actually, what I am looking for is an additional option within disk/restoreoptions. Actually a "quickbackup" of a restorepoint. That function would extract the specified restorepoint out of the backupset and store it again as a self contained backupimage. Within VeeamB&R for easy management and usability. Can something like that be done?

Thanks, Peter
chrisdearden
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Re: Saving a specific restorepoint for retention purposes

Post by chrisdearden »

Sounds similar to a "litigation freeze" kind of functionality.
Peejay62
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Re: Saving a specific restorepoint for retention purposes

Post by Peejay62 »

yes... you're not hinting are you? I just could imagine this being available in a upcoming release...
This would be a great feature as I am probably not the only one in need of such a function.
chrisdearden
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Re: Saving a specific restorepoint for retention purposes

Post by chrisdearden »

Its a request I have heard before :) makes since to me to do with an adhoc copy job or similar
Peejay62
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Re: Saving a specific restorepoint for retention purposes

Post by Peejay62 »

Yes, instead of restore complete vm or restore vmdk files write the appropriate blocks, a restore reads those blocks anyway, into a repository as a new, extracted backup that lives on it's own.
dellock6
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Re: Saving a specific restorepoint for retention purposes

Post by dellock6 »

Or another idea could be to have VeeamZIP using an existing backup as a source instead of a running VM.
Again not a hint, but a suggestion for a possible feature request.
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Peejay62
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Re: Saving a specific restorepoint for retention purposes

Post by Peejay62 »

thanks for thinking along. I hope this ends up at the r&d department for further evaluation.
George_Lenzer
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[MERGED] Long Term Legal Hold: Specific Restore Points/Files

Post by George_Lenzer »

I've been searching the forums for an answer to my question, and the closest QUESTIONS I've found are:

http://forums.veeam.com/veeam-backup-re ... 20084.html

and (even closer):

http://forums.veeam.com/veeam-backup-re ... 27439.html

But neither answer works for what I've been asked. My current set up:

-Multiple remote sites with Veeam repository/proxy/WAN accelerator sets
-Central storage site (DR site) with repo/proxy/WAN that all remotes perform backup copies to
-Central management site (main data center) that coordinates the Backup and Backup copy jobs for remote and central sites

Remotes:
I keep 14 restore points at most of the remote sites with some of the larger ones only holding 7 restore points.

Central Storage:
I use GFS to keep 14 daily, 9 weekly (to cover roughly a two month period), and 6 monthly.

The question:
If a legal hold on a particular user (file servers are part of the backups mentioned above) is requested, that particular user's data may need to be kept for up to two years, beyond the half a year of backups we retain with GFS. It seems it would be inefficient to change the GFS retention of that particular backup copy job just to hold onto the data for two years. The solutions I've come up with so far:

1. Restore the data from the oldest backup when requested and save it to the restored files location (which is our usual approach) as well as storing the restored data in some secondary location for the two years required (outside of Veeam). The reason to keep it is that we might be asked to restore the data again within the two year period. Pro: This is simple. Con: It might not be the most efficient use of disk space if many legal holds are in effect over time.

2. Make a new backup copy job just for the server that this user's data is on and set the retention period for that single VM to meet the two year requirement. Pro: It stays within Veeam. Con: It doesn't look like we can make a backup copy of a backup copy, so we'd only be able to go back 14 restore points with the new backup copy since that's all we keep at the remote site, and... the bandwidth needed to make a new backup copy especially if the file server is huge. Some might need seeding to even work.

3. Somehow determine which backup file(s) in the backup copy job that contains the data will be needed long term and copy those backup file to another location for later import if a restore is needed again at a later date. Pro: It stays in a format easily usable by Veaam. Con: It would require much more storage than the required data itself. One of the restores I had to perform was only a few kilobytes in size. Keeping a 900 gig backup for a few K is extremely inefficient.

We are moving away from tape, otherwise I'd probably go with saving off the backup copy data to tape for these situations.

I'm a newbie to Veeam, and I've used whatever free time I have to try and read the documentation, but I'm sure there are abilities I'm not yet aware of. I only recently learned about GFS for example. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
btmaus
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Re: Long Term Legal Hold: Specific Restore Points/Files

Post by btmaus » 1 person likes this post

"2. Make a new backup copy job just for the server that this user's data is on"
You can tell Veeam where to get the data from for that backup copy job, so for example, you can tell your 2nd backup copy job to get the data only from the 1st backup copy job repository location (check the job settings), that way it will only pull data from those retention points.

In v9, you can exclude files for example (or only include certain files) from the backup, so perhaps you can setup a 2nd backup copy job for the user data in question, and exclude everything else, reducing the size on the disk? You could also use the VeeamZIP function to take a once off backup and store that for 2 years.
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Re: Long Term Legal Hold: Specific Restore Points/Files

Post by George_Lenzer »

Thank you btmaus. I wasn't aware of the VeeamZIP functionality and I appreciate your sharing that information. That approach will work for instances where a lot of data needs to be held. My concern is more around the requests for long term hold of only a few megs of data (user's home dir for example) out of a large VM (many gigs in size). So far, it looks like my best option for small sets of data is to do a file restore for that user's home dir from Veeam and save it in a location dedicated to legal holds outside of Veeam.
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Re: Long Term Legal Hold: Specific Restore Points/Files

Post by dellock6 » 1 person likes this post

Or if you use the new v9,you can leverage file exclusions and create a manual backup of just the folders you want, and store that small backup file.
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Re: Long Term Legal Hold: Specific Restore Points/Files

Post by George_Lenzer »

Luca and Glenn, thanks again. That point hadn't quite settled in with me when I first read through Glenn's response. This sounds like the right solution. Now to find out about upgrading to v9... :)
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Re: Long Term Legal Hold: Specific Restore Points/Files

Post by larry » 1 person likes this post

I copy them off to a USB drive which I seal and handoff to legal, in two years they can return. Cost $99. For exchange I create a database for retention and place on its own drive, move user to new DB. then backup just that database drive, the Veeam explorer for exchange can pull mail out. If Legal wants me to hold just in case I seal in the bag, sign it and lock the usb drive in the tape vault. Just be sure and label with the end date so you know when to recycle,
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[MERGED] Saving a specific restore point from being deleted

Post by dspjones »

We run incremental forever backups currently set to store 85 restore points. The job inlcudes all production servers in one job. At the current rate we typically have about 2-3 weeks of restore points on disk at any given time for most servers.
Now, our database team is going to be deploying a new sql failover cluster. The servers have been built and on turned over to them on 1/22/2016. Backups started on 1/18/2016.... and is considered the pristine state of the machines.
They are building the databases and doing testing on those server to iron out the upgrade and deployment process for an application we use. What they want to do is revert those servers back to that state the night of go-live so that they can implement the production deployment on the same servers beginning at their pristine state. This will occur on 3/1/2016. By that time, that restore point will have gone away due to the retention. I don't want to change the retention of the job for just this one event so, my question is... Is there a way to prevent that 1 restore point from being deleted so that I can restore the machine to that point at a later date?
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Re: Saving a specific restore point from being deleted

Post by foggy »

You can temporarily restore VMs from that specific restore point (Instant Recovery, for example) without powering them on and backup them into a separate backup files.
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Re: Saving a specific restore point from being deleted

Post by dspjones »

ahhh... that makes perfect sense. Running it now. Thanks.
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Re: Saving a specific restore point from being deleted

Post by dspjones » 2 people like this post

Took a total of 23 minutes to complete this entire process from recovery to backup completion.... God, I love this product!
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Re: Long Term Legal Hold: Specific Restore Points/Files

Post by wirthon »

I was told by Veeam I could not copy a vm from a specific date to a USB Drive.
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Re: Long Term Legal Hold: Specific Restore Points/Files

Post by larry » 1 person likes this post

Open in file level restore, copy drive or folders to USB. This way if/when the data needs to be imaged it can be then read with no special program.
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Re: Long Term Legal Hold: Specific Restore Points/Files

Post by foggy »

If you need to get a VM state for the specific date into a separate backup file, please review this thread for some hints.
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Re: Long Term Legal Hold: Specific Restore Points/Files

Post by alanwilliams »

The issue with just file level restores is that any forensic data such as audit logs NTFS permissions, etc are gone / irrelevant once you copy it to a USB drive. I have been working on a very similar issue for our organization and we currently use USB drives. There are several issues with using these, the above list one be first and foremost. The preferred method would be to restore a copy of the VM containing the files in question for the hold and freezing it... This is the part that stumps me. Would one to a VMDK restore of the OS/Files and the secure that VMDK in a place where it can be turned off and on as needed? Most legal holds want data initially and then forensics of the data if it gets ugly. The trick to restoring a 2 terabyte file server to a point in time and then putting it on "ice" until needed is more so the space and time of retention.
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Re: Long Term Legal Hold: Specific Restore Points/Files

Post by tsightler » 3 people like this post

One of my favorite methods, when customers need to save a specific point for a VM from a backup chain, is to perform an instant restore of that VM restore point (powered off, restored with an alternate name, typically using the date as a suffix), and then perform a VeeamZIP of that instant restored VM to a dedicated repository. This way you now have the point in an unchanging, compressed format, and you can recover files, the full VMDK, or even spin up the VM from that point, or just copy it off to removable media or to cloud storage or whatever. You can even script this process if you want.
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[MERGED] Veeam fature request. Export of the recovery points

Post by mkelerikh »

Good morning Veeam.
I would like to see if this feature may already be available, and if not then I would like to initiate a feature request.

Request #1:
As a backup specialist for an MSP, from time to time I get requests to export a single recovery point, multiple recovery points, or a whole recovery point chain for litigation, forensics, or retention standpoint.
If I needed to fill that request today I have the following options:
Environment: VMware and hyper-v backups. Individual servers are bundled in to various jobs (usually sorted by OS, 3-7 servers per job), we use reverse incremental backup and store between 30-60 daily recovery points.
1. Restore VM files for each requested VM from each required recovery point - time and disk space consuming.
2. Save the whole recovery point set which includes multiple VMs - won't work for this due disk space and privacy reasons if I have to provide the recovery points to a 3rd party because the set may include foreign VMs.

Request #2:
I could be wrong but I think that current behavior of the "backup copy job" is to copy the latest recovery point each time one is available. Would it be possible to add functionality to enable the backup copy job to pickup older recovery points during the initial run. For example:
We have 30 recovery points in the main repository. We create a second repository and the backup copy job will copy the latest recovery point #30. What if I wanted to keep similar retention to begin with? I would like option that would enable me to set copy existing recovery points by the number of recovery points (for example last 25 recovery points), or by date range (between 05/20/2016 to today) during the initial run.
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Re: Saving a specific restorepoint for retention purposes

Post by foggy »

Hi Max, please review this thread for some hints regarding your request #1. Your second request can be fulfilled by this workaround.
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