I try to make a bare metal restore to a notebook that came back from repair with an emtpy hard disk.
Before I have sent the notebook to repair, I created a fresh recovery image and made a full backup to one external usb disk and an incremental one to a second usb disk. Both disk are my usual backup targets and are rotated every week.
My backups are encrypted, the password I have. When I boot the recovery image on the notebook, the vbm files on both disks (!) are not accepted. Failure: "unsupported vbm format".
I am really lost now and fear a 100% data loss. Please help!
there can be different reasons for this issue, so please keep working with Support.
Also I would recommend to go through this thread. Not sure if it is the same issue, but it might give you a hint.
In the meantime I could find a workaround to prevent data loss, maybe this is helpful for others:
I could open the latest vbk file in a VBR 11 Console and apply the encryption password. I restored all windows files to a server disk and the notebook hd as vhdx file. The notebook now runs as a virtuell machine on HYPER-V and no data is lost. That is great!
Now I am looking for an easy solution to copy the vhdx file back to the notebook disk. Any hint is appreciated!
My question in general is: I use the the Veeam Agent for Windows for many years and never had a problem with bare metal restores. It is a really cool product and I love it!
But how can it be, that vbm files get corrupted on two local backup disks, although all backups are marked as successfull?
My confidence in the reliability of Veeam Agent for Windows is shattered.
Finally the notebook is restored. What worked for me was:
Open the last good full backup file with a VBR 11 Console (Community Edition)
Convert the found disk0 into a virtuell hard disk (vhdx)
Create a new virtuell machine (VM) that boots from the vhdx
Make a full backup (backup to another location) in the VM to a local storage of the VM.
Detach the vhdx disk, and mount it to another PC.
Copy the *.vbm and the vbk of the full backup file to external disk
bare metal restore with success
Hey all. I have a backup chain that's been humming along, as far as I can tell, totally fine. Went to restore after a major failure and the chain looks fine but I get an "Unsupported VBM Format" error when I try to use file restore to browse the chain. The chain is not encrypted and there's no corruption on the medium it's stored on. Tried to browse via different versions of Veeam Agent / Veeam Endpoint (Very old 1.5 build and the latest) and even the bootable recovery media with the same results. I opened a case with Veeam support but no word back for a while after a few days. I've been reading that posting the case # in the forums can actually get some traction so I'm hoping that is the case.
The only other post I found about this that had any interest was that a gentleman was escalated up to T2 and they were able to find an "erroneous character" in the VBM file: veeam-agent-for-windows-f33/can-t-open- ... 62243.html
Merged your post to the existing discussion - you can try the suggested workaround. Meanwhile I'll ping support folks to check your case details. Thanks!
and fear a 100% data loss. Please help!