Quick DR question

[backupquestions]

I had a discussion today with some sales reps from other companies on cloud strategies etc. One of them works with Veeam customers quite a bit, and we got into talking about what happens in a DR scenario.

I informed him we have cloud connect backup copy job running each day, and if we had a disaster, I would essentially spin up a cloud VM, install veeam, add my service provider (enter dns and credentials) and then once connected, I can start performing restores. All of this should be within 20 minutes IF I had a target such as azure/aws vm or some kind of vpn connection from this cloud vpn to some vcenter/esxi hosts...

What he told me was that "the catalog import takes forever though" on the whole process of things.

We did not elaborate, but my thought was that he is meaning the "backup configuration restore" process, and I could understand all the SQL records may take that long etc.

But, my thought is, there is no requirement at all to even import that... I can just treat Veeam as a fresh install, and only need to point it at cloud connect and then restore.

Am I wrong? Is 30 min reasonable to assume that restores could at least be "started" by that time? (understanding that it could take days to finish restoring all vms, unless I did some instant recoveries along with regular restores etc)

[HannesK]

Hello,
sure, you can start without importing the old configuration.

Veeam backups are self-containing stand-alone backups. You can always start from scratch. That's one of the main design principles we have. It's no problem for restore to loose the configuration database.

Whether you can start a restore within 30min is hard go verify for an external person. But yes, if you have a Windows machine up and running fast, your network is prepared and you have resources to restore to... then 30min are realistic to open the VBR console and add cloud connect.

Best regards,
Hannes