Recovering from SURE BACKUP Job(s)

[drichou]

I feel this is the dumbest question I have ever asked a support forum, but I had "smarter people" within my company tell me that in a disaster or continuity issue that they would restore critical servers from a SURE BACKUP job or jobs. I use SB for testing and demonstrating that my restores are valid, but I have never heard of anyone intentionally using the SB jobs as their method of quick recovery. Can anyone tell me if this is an acceptable practice and even if it is possible over just doing an instant recovery?

[david.domask]

Hi Dirk, welcome to the forums.

Short Answer: You're correct, SureBackup is meant for verifying the backups and ensuring the machines in backups can boot, it's not intended for restores.

Long answer: Part of the SureBackup process is basically just a very orchestrated Instant Recovery into the Virtual Lab with additional verification options that the SureBackup job will perform. I suppose this is likely what your colleagues are maybe thinking and confusing a bit. A SureBackup job itself will unpublish the machines launched in the Virtual Lab after completion, though in theory you could further migrate these to production, but this would be really convoluted when you can just start an Instant Recovery and migrate to production afterwards.

Entire VM restore is the other main option for recovery, but you can also instant recovery specific disks, restore VM disks and configuration files, many many ways to get back up and running with Veeam

But in short you are correct, SureBackup isn't meant as a recovery feature specifically even if one could if they desired (and wanted to do a bunch of needless steps ) Excuse the long answer, just can imagine you had a heck of a conversation about this and I'm guessing the above was your colleagues' confusion.