Save an old Backup using Reverse Incremental

[Roberto Coni]

Hi all,
sorry for my poor english but i have a task to complete and want to know if there is a better solution than the one i'm currently thinking.
On wednesday my boss told me to keep the backup (or a snapshot of our servers) of 20 days ago for future needings. The servers are Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machines running on a VSpere 4.1U2 enviroment. My current backup policy is to save the machines using the reverse incremental method and keep 21 restore points without creating any active full backup.
Now my question is: to in order to achieve the task and have the capability to restore the state of our servers backed up 21 days ago do i have to save all the .VRB files along with the VBK or is there a method to "create" a full backup (single VBK file, so i can save space using the native deduplication) in a specific point in time starting from reverse incremental and save it in another location?
Any help is much appreciated.
Thanks in advance,
Roberto Coni

[dellock6]

Uhm, never did it myself, and I do not know if it it possible to extract a single VM from a backup. But this is what I wouls do:
- restore the VM from the desired restore point of 21 days ago, in a way it does not conflict with the production copy (different datastore, name...)
- without even powering it on, create a single full backup job of that VM so I will have a VBK file contaning only that VM

Luca.

[Roberto Coni]

Uhm, never did it myself, and I do not know if it it possible to extract a single VM from a backup. But this is what I wouls do:
- restore the VM from the desired restore point of 21 days ago, in a way it does not conflict with the production copy (different datastore, name...)
- without even powering it on, create a single full backup job of that VM so I will have a VBK file contaning only that VM
Luca.

Ciao Luca and thanks for the quick reply, but from your answer i see that this is not exactly what i need. You're talking 'bout extracting a single VM from a backup but i was meaning: can i create a "full backup file" starting from my first restore point of a reverse incremental backup? That file would contain all my virtual machines and all the data in a specific date so i can put in a tape and keep it for future usage.
From now on i decided to archive the VBK on a monthly basis just after the backup job is finished.
Therefore you gave me an idea, a little is better than nothing: i decided to restore all the "must have" VM from the farthest restore point (the one that i need) and save it with a backup
I hope there is a way to achieve my goal but in the meantime i'm going to create a backup starting from the manual restore operation.
Thanks in advance,
Roberto

[dellock6]

Ciao.
For sure, Veeam has the technology in their product to do this, since is the same activity it uses to extract data from a rollback during instant recovery. They would eventually need to change it a little bit to allow for backup extraction.
Maybe this can become an RFE for future versions