SharePoint recovery VM/Physical mix

[mlott@gie.com]

Our SharePoint servers are all virtualized and are being backed up with Veeam BR with application awareness enabled. The SQL server for these SP farms is a physical server which we are backing up with VEB. I can't seem to find a way to perform recovery of SharePoint items.

If I right-click on a an SP VM backup and select "Restore application items->Microsoft SharePoint content," I am presented with a list of SharePoint sites. I select a site and click next, which immediately throws up an error dialog, "Unable to find SQL Server VM hosting the content database... Start File Level Recovery on the required VM and then launch SharePoint item recovery..."

My option then seems to be to right-click on the Endpoint Backup for the SQL server and select "Restore guest files." Clicking through that I can then select "Application Items->SharePoint" But, since this is not a SharePoint server, no content databases are shown. If I select Application Items->SQL Server, I see the database files for recovery but of course no SharePoint content items.

Is there currently any way to connect these two backups so that I can browse the backed up SP content? If the SQL server were a VM, this would work, of course.

This is in reference to my support case 01962015.

[mlott@gie.com]

Things always start to work when I post questions in forums, so thank you for bearing with me. Perhaps this will be useful to someone in the future. The trick seems to be in what Veeam provides when opening the SQL server backup.

1. Right-click on the Endpoint backup for the SQL server.
2. Select "Restore guest files." Select the backup you want (date/time).
3. You should see the backed up drives in the file list.
4. Select "Application Items->SharePoint Items" from the toolbar.
5. The list of content databases is empty. Select Add Database.
6. Browse for the database in the next dialog. The default location is (for me) the C:\VeeamFLR directory in a subdirectory for the backed up SQL server. NOT the current data directory on the actual SQL server.
7. Locate the data files under the correct volume. For me this is Volume1 representing the second drive on the SQL server, i.e. not the C: drive.
8. Double-click on the associated database file.
9. You should now see the SP content from the selected database including subfolders for subsites and content.

[Mike Resseler]

Miles,

We actually love it when things start to work immediately after you posted them... :p (Nah, just kidding...). But your procedure is very interesting for many other people so thank you for that. The same applies sometimes for other workloads. When recovering with one of our explorers, if nothing shows up, you need to "manually" point to the database on that protected server.

Wit the agent for Windows we are bringing more application awareness to the server edition (agent for Windows is the new name for Veeam Endpoint Backup). I cannot say at this point in time whether this will solve this particular scenario but you will get the same application awareness processing as we have today in Veeam Backup and Replication for virtual servers so that will certainly make a nice difference.

Anyway, thanks again for the detailed instructions. I'm sure some people will get a benefit from this

Cheers
Mike

[zsoltesz]

I don't want to create a new post, because the situation is the same. We have Physical Windows 2016 failover cluster with SQL and Vmware virtual application servers. We use the newest Veeam BR and the newest Windows agent. Are there any possibilities to recover SP2016 elements in a simpler way?

Regards,
Zoli

[Mike Resseler]

Hi Zoli,

First: Welcome to the forums
Second: You can use the same Veeam explorer for Microsoft SharePoint to recover SharePoint items to your farm straight from your physical SQL backend server backups.