Feature Request - Bootstrap to Tape

[ekisner]

I was recently evaluating our backups, particularly against a scenario where malicious actors have infiltrated and compromised all resources, leading to a full site loss. Starting recovery of all resources from scratch.

The one thing a malicious actor can't hit is the air-gapped tapes I keep in a fire resistant safe in a separate building. Even if they have somehow corrupted the backups, if I go back far enough, I've got good tapes. Since I routinely audit the contents of tapes to verify integrity, I am always able to ensure that data loss will always be kept to a minimum.

Formatting the Veeam hardware, re-installing the OS, and re-installing Veeam is easy. Connecting the tape drive is easy. If the repository has been destroyed, however, I cannot recover the config. If the database is destroyed, finding the database on tapes would be a challenge. It's not impossible to recover from, by any stretch, but it's still "more to deal with". And speedy recovery is what separates good from great.

The Veeam database is pretty small, all things considered. The config, even more so. In the context of a tape job backing up a production environment, their size is almost irrelevant.

It would be super cool if, with the check of a box, my GFS tape job could include a bootstrap of everything Veeam needs to get back to that point in time. A copy of the database, a copy of the config, and the functionality to gracefully import and implement both from a simple wizard that lets you hit next a couple times.

At that point, getting my B&R server back up to 100% is as simple as running a wizard, letting me streamline the hardest part of a black start.

Thoughts?

[Mildur]

Hello Erik

I moved your request from the PowerShell forum to the Tape forum.
Have you considered to sent a config backup to a immutable S3 object storage?
One example with Wasabi (There are many other immutable S3 services). Create an immutable S3 bucket and configure your configuration backups with Wasabi as a target.

If you need to recover your entire server, you can download your BCO file from Wasabi and import it to a new backup server. It will contain all information about restore points, tape information and backup server components.

A copy of the database, a copy of the config, and the functionality to gracefully import and implement both

A database copy itself won't be much help. All credentials would be encrypted by the old backup servers machine key. The new backup server cannot use them. Therefore all Credentials have to be reconfigured.
Our configuration backup contains everything you need to recover your backup servers entire configuration. Restoring the configuration from an encrypted configuration backup file will import the original credentials.

Best,
Fabian