File cannot be accessed by the system - WIN guest restore

[nixoidas]

Hello,
Case #02592468

Using veeam explorer for guest file restore (windows) we cannot restore most of file server files. We get error "file cannot be accessed by the system". If we try to go to mounted volume to copy files manually, we get "access is denied". Veeam user which is backuping up data is domain admin on that vm.
If we try to restore files using linux appliance (guest files restore (linux), we are able to restore, but the files are damaged and unreadable. I can open files, for example .docx, but inside there are only rectangulars and no data.
Those files that we can restore are no different from those that we cannot. No difference in user rights or file extensions. Office documents mainly.
We even tried to restore entire vm from backup and manually copy files, but we were not able to due to error.
Also, we tried restoring from many different restore points and using different jobs:backup copy, replica and regular backup. Same issues occur no matter what we do.

More info:
veeam version 9.5 U3
This is hyper v platform. Windows 2012R2 standard veeam backup server. VM is Windows Server 2008R2 Enterprise.

[Tim St]

Hi,

does your backup have inline data deduplication enabled by any chance? If so, dedupe role must be installed on backup server (supposedly your hyper v?)
Though that might not explain why some files can be restored, errors are the same when trying to restore from a deduped volume while not having dedup role installed.

[cedrock]

Hi, We have the exact same issue.
What was the result of this case?
Did you resolved it by any Chance and how?

Thank you

Best regards

[wishr]

Hi Ced,

Welcome to Veeam Community Forums and thanks for posting your question.

The original case was closed due to no response from the customer. As far as I see there was an ongoing investigation with Symantec support because Symantec Vault has been used in that case, but we do not have any information yet on the final investigation result.

I would recommend you to reach out to our support team for a separated investigation.

BR,
Fedor

[cedrock]

Hi Fedor.

Yes, we also have Veritas Enterprise Vault for the archive of our fileserver data.
It's exact the same case...

I hope they find a solution for that. Otherwiese we will stopp the Vault for archiving our fileserver.

Thank you for the hint!

[wishr]

Hi Ced,

I meant the customer was about to reach Symantec with this issue, but we do not have any information on how this ended. It could be useful if you can raise a support ticket to them as well, because we are not aware of what is causing this behavior on the Symantec end yet. Maybe some simple reconfiguration can solve this.

Thanks

[cedrock]

Hmmm for me it sounds logic and not like an issue that Veeam cannot acces files on a backuped drive that aren't on that drive anymore. They are in the Vault DB not on the fileserver anymore. There are just references.
So no chance for veeam to backup them from filesystem.

For me not a case for a support ticket. We can restore from the Vault console or disable the vault and let Veeam do the job....

[wishr]

Hi Ced,

I went one more time through the tickets the initial customer had (found another ticket following the initial one with an extremely long conversation).

Actually, the concern was not the inability to back up the files themselves (you are correct in your assumption about the files being not on the drive) or even backup Symantec placeholders (the last worked fine), but an issue with placeholders restoration. In the final, the customer has managed to resolve that with some help from both Veeam and Symantec.

Basically, it turned out that it is required to install all the prerequisites needed for Vault file server on Veeam B&R server: FSA agent, vault file collector service, and vault file placeholder service. After that, they were able to restore placeholders from the backup to the file server (to the initial location).

Hope this could help somebody else facing the same difficulty!

Cheers

[cedrock]

Hi Fedor

Thanks a lot for all those good information!

We will see how we proceed in this case.
If we decide to install all these Vault components on the Veeam Server I will let you know the result for shure.

Have a nice weekend

BR

Ced