File listing of a backed-up VM

[st3lb]

What is the best way to get a file listing for specific backed-up VMs (Guest File System indexing is enabled)? Is there a Veeam ONE report that lists backed-up files and folders, or is PowerShell or the REST API the better approach? I also tried the Enterprise Manager but couldn't export a file listing.

The background is that after a backup, I need to have the customer approve the data, and they should receive a listing of the backed-up files. The only solution I can think of is to mount the backup and then generate a listing using PowerShell (Get-ChildItem), but that is not practical.

[david.domask]

Hi st3lib, welcome to the forums.

Currently there is no such report on Guest Indexing, and regrettably no means of exporting the Guest Index or reading from the index directly.

If it's a hard requirement to have a full list of files, Disk Publishing can help here and you can use Powershell indeed. Or, you can use Powershell and Compare-VBRWindowsGuestItemAttributes to compare the backup to production and get a listing that way as well as information on differences between the backup and the production machine.

A quick question, what is the specific requirement from the client that they need a list of files on the machine? VMs are backed up at the image level, not in-guest at the file level, so the current state of the machine will always be captured in the backup, regardless of full or incremental. If a given file isn't in backups, then the file was not on the server at the time of backup (or on an excluded disk).

If you can explain the requirement a bit more, perhaps there's a better way of meeting the requirements for your customer's approval.

[st3lb]

Hi David,

thanks for you quick response. I somewhat anticipated that there wouldn't be a straightforward solution available.

This concerns a data partition of a virtual machine. Data is written to this partition at irregular intervals and subsequently backed up by us. As part of a process we have defined, the client receives a listing of the backed-up files and performs a comparison before deleting the data on their end. Only then is the 'handover' considered successfully completed.

[david.domask]

Understood. I think probably the disk publishing solution + powershell can help then. It's not quite one click, but the script should be pretty straightforward to export to .txt or .csv from powershell.