testing vbo datastores (adb's) in restores

[mcz]

Dear veeam-PM's,

if you have backed up a vm, which contains those famous adb-files which vbo uses, you could directly start the restore using the exchange explorer. So far so good, but this is the second time this year that I'm not able to use the restore directly.

The first case was a backup on our object storage (archive) which was 2,5 years old and there the database version (adb) was way too old to be compatible with current exchange explorers. So it was quite an effort to update the (restored) source to a version where the explorer was able to read. Please be aware that the explorers itself are/were not installed on the proxy, that's why I needed a second instance to restore or better said we run into multiple incompatibilities together with the B&R product, also we had databases in dirty shutdown, etc.

The second case (#04908438) is (now) quite simple: Using the (same) exchange explorer from vbo restore works fine but not from the vbk file. I've found out that it must be a bug in combination with vss - whenever I stop the service before I the B&R backup takes place, everything is fine, also when you copy adb-folders (during stopped services), you can easily attach them from the explorer and everything goes well.

My assumption is that there's no specific test on your side to check if it's possible to restore from adb's which were created by vbo and probably written during vss snapshots. Am I right? Also those incompatibilities are quite hard when you hit them, because you don't know it until you need them and you always assume that you can restore from 2-3 year old backups. I mean eventually you can somehow restore, but I remember it took a while to bring it to life...

Are there any plans to integrate those scenarios into the testlabs? Thanks for letting me know!

[Gostev]

1. This is unlikely as maintaining capability with older version is a huge dev/QC effort. But as the product matures, less and less changes will be made to the backup format anyway, so hopefully the issue will resolve itself with time. Until then, in those rare cases our support will be happy to assist you with the needed restores.

2. Sounds like some bug or environmental issue that needs to be investigated and fixed. As I definitely remember being able to restore Office 365 items directly from VBK of a VBO VM.