Intergration with MS volume file shadow copy

[wparson]

IS there any way for users to directly access previous snapshots much like you can using the "previous versions" functionality of MS volume file shadow copy. It seems redundant to me to run snapshots with veeam and dedicate space for user accessible snapshots.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi William,

Can you please clarify your question as I'm not sure snapshots you want to give the access to? VM snapshots? VM backup restore points?

Thanks!

[Gostev]

I think William is talking about giving end users ability to restore their own files, and going as far as integrating this functionality directly into Windows Explorer.

[wparson]

Since Veeam uses VSS to create the snapshots, it would seem that you could integrate with explorer to recover files from these snapshots in the same way volume file shadow copy does. It uses VSS to take snaps of folders and lets uses, based on the NTFS security setting, inspect and restore previous versions of folders or files without a backup admin. This has saved me countless hours in search and restore from backups but I am essentially snapshotting the disk with VFSC and Veeam, thereby wasting drive space.

My way around this is to "tier " the VFSC as an multi daily snapshot and use veeam or san snaps nightly, weekly or monthly depending on the data. I would prefer to only administrative snaps through Veeam if possible instead of both VFSC and Veeam and the SAN.

[Gostev]

Since Veeam uses VSS to create the snapshots, it would seem that you could integrate with explorer to recover files from these snapshots in the same way volume file shadow copy does.

Veeam does not create persistent VSS snapshots. The VSS snapshot we create exists only for the duration of backup, and is discarded immediately after.