Extract VMs to New Backup

[brupnick]

Good morning-

Management has recently decided to change the retention policy for four of our more important VMs - file server, mail server, etc. These VMs are currently part of backup jobs that run active fulls once a month and traditional incrementals every week night. My .VBKs are written to tape for long term retention, so I have the last 12 months that I can restore.

My question is this: Is there a way to restore these monthly .VBKs from tape and extract/copy out the backup files so that I only have a .VBK with these 4 VMs? Or will I have to import the .VBKs into VBR, restore the VMs to vCenter and then run a new VBR job with just these 4 (or use extract.exe for something similar)?

Thank you!
Brian

[veremin]

Probably, the easiest way you have is to let everything as it is, create additionally a new job with a new retention policy being specified and backup given VMs within it.

Hope this helps.
Thanks.

[brupnick]

Thanks Vladimir. My mind must have been somewhere else this morning because I left out a very important piece of this puzzle. They are changing the retention period from 12 to 36 months. As I mentioned, my .VBKs are currently on tape. We have purchased a NAS that will provide enough space to satisfy this new retention requirement. What I'd like to do is get these 4 VMs out of the .VBKs that are on tape and into a new .VBK that is on my NAS.

Again, I apologize for leaving out this very important detail.

[veremin]

Or will I have to import the .VBKs into VBR, restore the VMs to vCenter and then run a new VBR job with just these 4 (or use extract.exe for something similar)?

Correct.

What I'd like to do is get these 4 VMs out of the .VBKs that are on tape and into a new .VBK that is on my NAS.

Unfortunately, it’s not possible.

Just out of curiosity - why the creating of new job from the scratch doesn’t answer your requirements?

Hope this helps.
Thanks.

[brupnick]

Thanks Vladimir; this is what I thought, but wanted to be sure before proceeding.

Just out of curiosity - why the creating of new job from the scratch doesn’t answer your requirements?

My fulls are set to run this weekend, so I have created a new job with only these 4 VMs with my new NAS as the target. This is fine for all future fulls, but I'd like to get the previous backups of these 4 VMs onto the NAS as well. Unfortunately, they are mixed in with about 40 other VMs and split between two separate jobs. I thought about just keeping these .VBKs, but fulls of the 4 VMs total approximately 1 TB, while the .VBKs for the two jobs that I would need to save are about 4 TB and I can't justify wasting 3 TB of space per full.