Verifying backups

[chaycock]

Is there a way to verify backups are good without having to actually do a restore?
I had a nasty surprise this weekend. I was testing some new hardware and decided to do a restore from a current backup and got errors during the restore that there were bad blocks in the backup file (something about LZ unable to read next block). So had I actually had a disaster, this backup would have been useless to me. This is a current backup that runs every night and I have never received any errors from the backup process saying there was a problem with it. It seems like there should be a way to have a process read an entire backup and make sure it is usable without actually having to restore it. I have close to 5 machines backing up and it would take forever to manually try and restore all of them periodically to ensure the backup integrity. Also, I don't usually happen to have a machine available that can be used to test restores. I also considered using a VM to test a restore, but I don't have a machine that has enough drive space to create a VM disk large enough to contain some of the restores.

[Dima P.]

Hi Carlton,

The only option for now is actually to perform a recovery. Frankly speaking you can use a file level restore from a latest incremental backup or Instant VM recovery to Hyper-V

[chaycock]

It would be really nice (and probably not difficult at all) if they provided a utility that would read the backups as though it was going to restore but just not actually write out the restored file.

Since I am not using this in the context of VMs (the endpoints are physical machines), the VM recovery option does not really help my situation.

[chaycock]

>Frankly speaking you can use a file level restore from a latest incremental backup

Which assumes you have a spare drive and enough storage space to do a restore.

Another idea would be to restore to a 'null' or 'dummy' drive that looks and works like a regular drive except that it does not actually save/store any of the data. That way, you could do a restore to this fake drive thus getting Veeam to read the backup but not have the issue of needing storage, plus it would be quite a bit faster.

However, I am not aware of any null/dummy drivers that create a fake drive. It would be similar in principle to a RAM disk except that it would not actually store any data.

[Technogod]

From my experience with Acronis TI 2017 if you can mount the backup you should be fine. If you can open VAW's latest incremental backup to perform a FLR you should be fine. I hear you, it would be nice.

[bubba1983]

We are currently testing Veeam physical agent for windows and was wondering about the same thing. We are backing it up to a USB External hard drive as a stand alone software. It works great but if you have 9 or 10 other servers setup the same way which are all spread out in different branch offices, you cannot remote into each server one by one once a week to restore the data and hope it restores successfully as that would take a long time. Is there a way to automate this process with Power Shell or another way for Veeam for Veeam to test the backups?

How do I submit a feature request for this?