Restore VMs/Exchange Files from Tape?

[FBartsch]

Hey guys,

maybe i'm a bit blind and can't find the correct function but:

At the moment I type a VM name into the tape restore wizard and check the restore point I will get.
Then he shows me the backup size of the VM but nevertheless he will restore the "full" backup file first to the repository instead of just the VM Files.

That means...

Everytime I just like to restore some mails with a size of maybe some MB, I first need to copy (in this case) 4,9TB to the repository which takes about 6 hours. And you know that backup size is growing up over time. In this example it's an older tape backup.

Would I like to restore something from tapes with todays size it would take about 15h, just to get some mails back. That is much too long. =/

Is there no way to skip that copy job that he will restore mails directly from tape over the Exchange Restore Wizard?

Thanks!

Flo

[Egor Yakovlev]

Hi Florian.

Tapes are sequential read\write by nature, thus to read a part of a file(random IOs to find an email, read its content, restore to production) we need to read entire .edb file from the backup first. Likewise to read an exchange database .edb from inside virtual disk .vmdk from inside backup file .vbk on the tape, we must read entire backup file.
Depending on repository\infrastructure speed, it might be faster to run Restore from Tape to Infrastructure directly. You can restore entire VM to production(disconnect network) and feed it's .edb to Veeam Explorer for Exchange. Worth checking.

Hope that helps!