Trying to find the correct rollback snapshot.

[mtk]

Hi guys,

as I am new to this forum, let me first start with a short introduction and a description of the circumstances I am working under, regarding Veeam.
My name is Marcel and I work at a Germany machinery factory site in a IT dept. consisting of 5 colleagues for 400 PC-clients.
It is one of those IT depts. where we are mostly kind of alrounders, in a "everybody does everything as best as he can"-way, so to say. Things that are too involved for us are handled by third party consultants.
All this leads to pretty bad documentation on all systems/projects/whatnot.

Right now I am trying to cover all the topics my colleage usually does, while he is on vacation. I am by no means a Veeam expert, so please excuse if I misuse the one or the other term.

[tl,dr]
Puh, long introduction, thankfully my question is really short:
We have some files in one of our VMs (VMs are handled with vSphere on ESXi hosts), that got corrupted. That VM is one of our main fileservers runnning on Windows Server 2008 R2.
The corrupted files where created at the end of last-year. Now when my coworkers tried opening them (which happens raarely as in 2-3 times a year), they noticed, that the files arecorrupt. In fact those files went from >1 GB down to 265KB.
Nobody knows how or more important when the files got corrupted. So my question is: How can I list the different versions of the file, to find the exact date, when the data was still intact? Most guides I looked at explain everything very detailed up to a point where they simply say "Choose your desired Snapshot". I however don't know, which is my

Our backup is configured as follows: Daily reverse incremental backups to disk. Every weekend those disks are mirrored onto tape (LTO with barcodes).

I understand that this is either a pretty basic question or it is a functionality that is not within the Scope of Veeam. I have that impression because I spent the last hour googling in english and german, worked through the User Guide on the veeam homepage and even had a look at your FAQ here in the forums. Maybe I am just lacking the correct search terms or I don't see the wood for the trees - drop me a line with a tip and I might be able to help myself.

Thank you very much in advance.

Marcel

[foggy]

Hello, Marcel. Welcome to the forums.

The most straightforward way would be to search for the file in all the restore points using Enterprise Manager. However, it is available to you only if you're meeting the following:

- You have guest file system indexing enabled in the job that is backing up this VM;
- You're using Veeam B&R Enterprise edition;
- You have Enterprise Manager installed and guest file system catalog retention is set to the value that covers the moment of corruption (the default retention setting is 3 months, though).

Otherwise I'm afraid there's no easy way to identify the required restore point.

[mtk]

Hi foggy,

thank you very much for your detailed answer and for not ignoring this rookie question.

Unfortunately I only meet the first of the three conditions. So I guess I'm going back to start, get some of the monthly tapes out of the safe and try my very best. Thankfully the specific files are only yearly exports, that are used for read only references throughout the year (or at least it should be like this).

Thanks again for your input. While it doesn't help for the current problem, I will surely use this information to improve our backup system for the future.

[foggy]

Thanks again for your input. While it doesn't help for the current problem, I will surely use this information to improve our backup system for the future.

One point that you can keep in mind while thinking about possible improvements is that if you were using backup copy jobs to send backups to the second location for longer retention, you would be able to search them even with Standard version, as indices are stored as long as the corresponding restore point is registered in the console.