How do I list restore jobs?

[pshute]

I've like to get a list of running restore jobs, but Get-VBRJob doesn't list them. Is there another command to use?

Eg I'd like to be able to see Exchange item restores and guest file restores.

[HannesK]

Hello,
restore sessions (no real jobs) are covered by various get-*restoressession cmdlets

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... l?ver=95u4
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... l?ver=95u4

Get-VBRRestoreSession and Get-VBRExchangeItemRestoreSession might help you

Best regards,
Hannes

[pshute]

Thanks for that. The data I want is in Get-VBRRestoreSession in the Options field. How do I extract the subfields in there? I need the InitiatorName. Apologies for my lack of Powershell knowledge.

[HannesK]

Apologies for my lack of Powershell knowledge.

same here - I do any scripting / programming by searching everything on the internet. So I can only guide you into a direction, but creating the real code would take me the same time like it takes for you

[teltrop]

Dont know the exact property name but this should be what you are looking for:

Code: Select all

Get-VBRRestoreSession | Select-Object -Property InitiatorName

Another way would be:

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$RestoreSessions = Get-VBRRestoreSession
$RestoreSessions.InitiatorName

If you want to loop through each Session you might want to do it like this:

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$RestoreSessions = Get-VBRRestoreSession

foreach($RestoreSession in $RestoreSessions){
	$RestoreSession.InitiatorName
}

[teltrop]

Forgot to mention that if the information is inside for example options it needs to look like

Code: Select all

$RestoreSessions.Options.InitiatorName

[pshute]

Doesn't work. I think the problem is that the contents of Options, which contains the InitiatorName, is xml.

This will list it for each job, but I don't know how to extract the InitiatorName:

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Get-VBRRestoreSession | select Options

I can get Options' methods with:

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Get-VBRRestoreSession | select Options |Get-Member

The only useful looking one is ToString(), but this gives an error:

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Get-VBRRestoreSession | select Options.ToString()

But it works this way (why?) and I can access and manipulate the xml as a string (used the substring method as an example), but surely there's a neater way:

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$RestoreSessions = Get-VBRRestoreSession
foreach($RestoreSession in $RestoreSessions){
	$RestoreSession.Options.ToString().substring(1,200)
}

[veremin]

It's not clear what exact property you want to extract from restore session.

If you want to emulate the last script, then, the syntax used in the first two examples is incorrect, something like this might work better:

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(Get-VBRRestoreSession).Options.ToString()

Thanks!

[jhoughes]

You can find this detail under the Info property (a few levels lower), rather than having to parse out the details from the string.

This will give you the job name, the creation time of the restore session, the reason entered in the session, and the user who initiated the session:

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Get-VBRRestoreSession | Select-Object -Property JobName, CreationTime, @{n='Reason';e={$_.Info.Reason}}, @{n='Initiator';e={$_.Info.Initiator.Name}}

You can also pull this detail from the 'RestoreSessionAudit' property.

[pshute]

Thanks, this is giving me what I want:

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Get-VBRRestoreSession | where {$_.IsWorking}| Select-Object -Property JobName, CreationTimeUTC, EndTimeUTC, IsCompleted, IsWorking, IsStarted, @{n='Initiator';e={$_.Info.Initiator.Name}}, @{n='Reason';e={$_.Info.Reason}}

It makes me realise how little I know about Powershell. I'm under the impression it's supposed to be self documenting, so I'm wondering how you knew:
- to use Select-Object instead of Select
- to use Info.Initiator.Name instead of InitiatorName that I could see in the Options field.

[jhoughes]

Select is just the alias for Select-Object, so it's the same. I expanded it since you said you were new to PowerShell, so you can see what all is in use.

You need to use the Get-Member cmdlet to be able to inspect the properties of the object that you are getting returned.

If you need a GUI style tree view, check out the Show-Object cmdlet that us in the PowerShellCookbook module by Lee Holmes, it's in the PowerShell Gallery.

Using Get-Member is the closest to "self-documenting" since the .NET reflection will give you the object type, properties and methods.

Check out the Learn Learn PowerShell in a Month of Lunches to get some basics to help with these efforts, it'll walk you through these cmdlets and how to use them easily.

[pshute]

But how did you know the fields I wanted were also in the Info property? When I ran

Code: Select all

Get-VBRRestoreSession | select *

it didn't return anything that looked useful, but Options did.

[jhoughes]

Honestly, some of it is knowing the PowerShell basics to objects, understand properties and definitions. Once you understand some of the basics, this becomes a lot easier.

Sometimes you have to just do some discovery to see what is contained within these objects returned by PowerShell, as these objects will vary across platforms, applications, or the code written by the author of any script/module.

Even I miss things in the results sometime, as I just found the Initiator property at the top level of the session object while writing this reply (Get-VBRRestoreSession | select Initiator)

For further explanation about how to perform some discovery, keep reading below.

Within Veeam objects, when you see object properties with a definition like 'Veeam.Backup.Model.CRestoreSessionInfo', that will be another object with additional properties contained within it.

You can determine these properties fairly easily with 2 different methods.

First, you can pipe your object to Get-Member and look at the Property members (I give a trimmed list just as an example):

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PS C:\Users\svc_veeam_br> $sessions = Get-VBRRestoreSession
PS C:\Users\svc_veeam_br> $sessions[0] | Get-Member -MemberType Property

   TypeName: Veeam.Backup.Core.CRestoreSession

Name                 MemberType Definition
----                 ---------- ----------
AuxData              Property   string AuxData {get;}
BaseProgress         Property   int BaseProgress {get;}
CreationTime         Property   datetime CreationTime {get;}
CreationTimeUTC      Property   datetime CreationTimeUTC {get;}
Description          Property   string Description {get;}
EndTime              Property   datetime EndTime {get;}
EndTimeUTC           Property   datetime EndTimeUTC {get;}
FileLogger           Property   Veeam.Backup.Core.IFileCommanderLogger FileLogger {get;}
Id                   Property   guid Id {get;}
Info                 Property   Veeam.Backup.Model.CRestoreSessionInfo Info {get;}
Initiator            Property   Veeam.Backup.Model.CBaseSessionInfo+SInitiator Initiator {get;}
...
Platform             Property   Veeam.Backup.Common.CPlatform Platform {get;}
RestoreSessionAudit  Property   Veeam.Backup.Core.RestoreSessionAudit RestoreSessionAudit {get;}
RestoreType          Property   Veeam.Backup.Model.CRestoreSessionInfo+ERestoreType RestoreType {get;}
Result               Property   Veeam.Backup.Model.CBaseSessionInfo+EResult Result {get;}
SessionInfo          Property   Veeam.Backup.Model.CBaseSessionInfo SessionInfo {get;}
State                Property   Veeam.Backup.Model.CBaseSessionInfo+EState State {get;}
StateXml             Property   string StateXml {get;}
Tracer               Property   Veeam.Backup.Core.ILogTracer Tracer {get;}
Uid                  Property   Veeam.Backup.Model.CRestoreSessionUid Uid {get;}

The second way to find these properties is just to look within the results that you get back from piping the session to either 'select *' or 'fl *'.

Either of those cmdlets will display all properties of the input object since you declared '*' to the Properties parameter (just trust that if you don't immediately get it before reading up on it). The full property list will give you some properties with really long names as their value/definition, so you can try using them as the property within Select-Object.

(Trimmed results a bit here also)

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PS C:\Users\svc_veeam_br> $sessions = Get-VBRRestoreSession
PS C:\Users\svc_veeam_br> $sessions[0] | fl *

Info                 : Veeam.Backup.Model.CRestoreSessionInfo
Uid                  : 611ae54f321e410eb29a0008545f9ebc
LeaseUid             : d831004f0d3647d0b72c82392c16d00d
Initiator            : Veeam.Backup.Model.CBaseSessionInfo+SInitiator
OibId                : 5b7739bb-89fb-4b2b-a121-3d73a0f51271
Platform             : EVmware
Options              : <FlrInfo BackupName="AUSVCENTER-NoTag" OibDT="09/16/2019 04:49:51" MountId="00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000"><Data OibId="5b7739bb-89fb-4b2b-a121-3d73a0f51271" IsVbrSvcRestoreOwner="True" InitiatorName="FSGLAB\jhoughes"
                       InitiatorSid="S-1-5-21-1579299889-1624571845-370692084-1104" ShareCredsId="00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000" EsxId="00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000" PoolRef="" FolderRef="" IsWinFlrFromSanSnapshot="False" Reason="File restore re
                       CreatorType="1" IsEnterpriseRestore="False" CloudConnHostId="00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000" CloudProviderId="00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000" GuestCredsId="00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000" IsGuiFlrRequest="False" Comlpet
                       CancelExistingRestoreTask="False" AppliencePlatform="0" UseHostApiForOriginalVm="False" OverwriteItems="False"><RestoreItem Name="XAMLGuiSnippetWBetterErrorHandling.ps1" Path="D:\Code\XAMLGuiSnippetWBetterErrorHandling.ps1" Size="0" Type
...
RestoreSessionAudit  : Veeam.Backup.Core.RestoreSessionAudit
...
JobType              : FileLevelRestore
JobName              : FLR_[ausdev01]
Name                 : FLR_[ausdev01]
...
IsCompleted          : True
IsWorking            : False
IsStarting           : False
IsPostprocessing     : False
JobId                : 43f215ba-ed0b-4809-8cd8-22071d0da188
Result               : Success
State                : Stopped
EndTime              : 9/16/2019 11:15:52 AM
EndTimeUTC           : 9/16/2019 11:15:52 AM
CreationTime         : 9/16/2019 11:15:00 AM
...
Tracer               : Veeam.Backup.Core.CSessionLogTracer

I hope that some of this helps until you get the basics of manipulating objects in PowerShell.

I'd also suggest again the Show-Object cmdlet, since that will easily show you which objects have additional information, as you can see graphically that they can be expanded.

It wasn't until trimming the results and capturing this screenshot that I caught the Initiator property at the top level, so sometimes we all have to look, or even look again to be sure.