Baremetal recovery from USB disk, what disk format

[sandsturm]

Hi

I want to conduct a baremetal recovery, where my backupfiles are on a USB disk. The USB disk was attached to a Linux hardened repository server and a backup copy job writes the data to this usb disk. I unmounted the disk from this server and attached it to the server, which I want to recover. I started the Veeam recovery media from an USB stick on this server and there I'm not able to see the data from this USB disk. If I check the drivers (within "Tools" option from veeam recovery media). The USB disk is listed with State=online. Therefore I think the drivers should be okay for this disk. The usb disk is formated with xfs, is that maybe the problem? I wasn't able to find the possible formatting options for such a USB disk, which options do I have?

thx,
sandsturm

[Mildur]

Hi sandsturm

Our recovery media is based on Windows RE environment. Windows cannot read XFS file systems.
The USB disk should have a NTFS filesystem.

The USB disk was attached to a Linux hardened repository server and a backup copy job writes the data to this usb disk.

I don't recommend connecting USB disks directly to a Linux hardened repository. That way you introduce a new attack capability.
Please also consider, that you cannot do bare metal recovery directly from backup copy files on a USB disk.

Veeam Agent Backup Copy backup files always have to be restored over network from a Veeam Repository. The recovery media cannot directly read them from the usb disk. Only backup files from a backup job can be restored directly.

Best,
Fabian

[sandsturm]

is NTFS really the only option? FAT, exFAT, ext3 or ext4 are not possible?

[Mildur]

Yes, exFat is not supported as a target. FAT32 only allows 4GB files, not enough for machine backups. And ext3+ext4 cannot be opened by Windows RE.

I added an additional note to my previous comment:

I don't recommend connecting USB disks directly to a Linux hardened repository. That way you introduce a new attack capability.
Please also consider, that you cannot do bare metal recovery directly from backup copy files on a USB disk.

Veeam Agent Backup Copy backup files always have to be restored over network from a Veeam Repository. The recovery media cannot directly read them from the usb disk. Only backup files from a backup job can be restored directly.

You can't use the recovery media to restore backup copy files directly from an external disk. You must restore backups from copy jobs backup files always over the network (from a Veeam backup repository).

Best,
Fabian

[sandsturm]

okay, thank you for the clarification. Good to know that Backupcopyjob files will not work in this scenario