Configuration Recovery loses all restore points on tape

[mschlott]

I just moved my veeam backup server to new hardware. Based on information from here and 2 different support cases, I relied on using a restore from configuration backup to get my server up and running again. Everything seems to have worked except that the only restore points I have are the ones currently on disk. My inventory shows all of my tapes, but under backups I have no restore points for my tape jobs.

I have a backup to tape job that copies backups from all of my disk repositories to tape. I have over 100 tapes off site with backups on them that I need to be able to recover from just as if they are on disk.

Support is telling me to bring all of my tapes back from off site and invintory them. Is this really the reccomended solution for this? If this is the case, please include this piece of information for the future.

[mschlott]

After a little testing, I see that invintorying my tapes is not going to bring back the VM restore point information. To get this, I will need to recover all of the the data from the tapes and import the backups before I can see VM level backup information.

This means if I want to restore a file from a VM that is no-longer on disk, I have to hope I know which group that vm was in at the time of backup,(which I don't), and restore all of the VBK and VIB files in that backup chain to disk. Then import those backups. Once that is done I will have the information I need to see if the file I need to restore is even in that backup chain.

To make sure I have all of the information that I need, which I had before recovering my server from backup, I would have to bring back 130 tapes and recover all of the data on them to disk and import those backups. This would take over a month of my time if I were able to commit all of my time to it.

I think this is my fault for thinking that Tape is a second tier of backup media. It is clearly meant to only be a second copy of backups that will always be on disk. I can never put long term archives on tape and expect veeam to help me figure out what is on those tapes once the data is no longer on disk.

[Gostev]

Hi Mike, that is not correct conclusion actually. The data does not have to be present on disk for us to be able to track VMs and restore points on tapes. You are right though that configuration backup does not preserve this information at this time. Thanks.

[mschlott]

OK, I'm listening. How do I see the restore points of VMs that are only on tape?

[tsightler]

Do you still have your database from the old system? Might be worth trying to recover from that.

[mschlott]

I still have a backup of my DB, but according to Veeam support, they do not recommend using it due to the risk of future problems. I have done this in the past and ended up with an unstable system, so I agree with them.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Mike,

Did your support engineer elaborate on why it is not recommended to use existing configuration database?

Thanks!

[mschlott]

Just that it could potentially cause problems. Since everything is currently working with my server, it was not reccomended.

[Vitaliy S.]

Ok, but this procedure has been successfully used prior introducing our backup configuration utility, thanks for the clarification anyway.