Advice required on granular restores: Restoring DNS Entries?

[Vini]

Hey all,

We recently lost a few DNS entries from our live DC - these changes then got replicated and caused a world of paint.

How would YOU restore missing/lost DNS entries, from a successful, Veeam backup of a DC?

Kind regards,
James

[foggy]

James, you can perform Instant Recovery of your DC with network disabled and copy the required records.

[Vini]

Thanks for your reply @foggy, I figured as much - which is fine. I was just wondering if there was a granular DNS recovery tool.

[foggy]

No such a tool. In case of AD-integrated DNS, though, it could probably be covered by Veeam Explorer for AD, however it is currently not.

[Gostev]

I will add this to the list of potential Veeam Explorer for Active Directory enhancements, but as of right now you are the first to ask for this kind of functionality.

[dellock6]

Also DNS entried do not suffer from USN rollbacks, you can quickly read dns records from the restored VM and recreate the records in the production VM.
If you damaged a large DNS zone, you better use dnscmd from the command line, dump the zone in a file, do the same for the production dns, and use a diff tool to look for what's changed.

[jsartori]

I was having a issue with the BPA. One of the steps was to backup zone file and restore it. I restored a blank file so nothing worked till I was able to restore it properly. I opened a case with Veeam and was told it could not be done. maybe we need a dns explorer or the AD one to include the AD Integrated zone. What do u think?

[foggy]

Joe, this is already on our to-do list, thanks.

At the time being, you can read DNS records from an instantly recovered VM and recreate them in the production VM manually or use AD Recycle Bin, if applicable to your issue.