SureBackup Question

[nunciate]

I am testing out SureBackup jobs after we had an incident. I would love to use the validation features of SureBackup to make sure my backups are clean.

Here is what happened. We have a file server with multiple 2Tb drives (vmdk). One of these drives went bad at some point, When we rebooted the server the drive was showing up in Windows Explorer but otherwise inaccessible.

When I attempted to do a restore from my backup I found that the drive was not listed in the Windows File Restore option. I brought up an offline Instant Restore of the entire VM and it had the same issues as the live VM. The drive was there but inaccessible. I was able to utilize some command line tools to break into the bad partition and restore some files we needed. I am also lucky because I had a copy of the entire drive somewhere else.

I plan to setup a SureBackup job and do the Backup Integrity Check where it validates the entire virtual disk contents.
Does anyone know if this is designed to catch something like I experienced where the drive is available but the partition itself has gone corrupt?

[veremin]

I believe in order to detect issues happened with the guest partition you should create custom script and run it as a part of SureBackup verification process. Thanks.

[Gostev]

Normally, you want to run recovery test against the actual application. With applications like DC, Exchange, SQL it's easy (they will simply not start if the volume that hosts their application databases is offline, so even "stock" application verification scripts will fail).

The file server case is a tricky one though... I would perhaps make a custom script that reads some small static file from a file share on each volume on your file server. This would ensure that each volume is online.