Year old file

[jprovine@bradley.edu]

I am new to veeam and I need to know how to search for a file that maybe up to a year old.

[Gostev]

If you had guest file system indexing enabled for the corresponding job, you can do that in the Enterprise Manager under Files tab.

[jprovine@bradley.edu]

I checked the job and Enabled guest file system indexing does not appear to be turned on for the job in question

[Gostev]

In that case, I am afraid the only option here is to take the best guess of restore points that can have the required file available, and mount them one by one to search for the file.

[jprovine@bradley.edu]

Wow that could take forever and the tape I need might also in written over before I find it LOL thanks

[ejenner]

I've asked about this before. I think this is what you'd call a 'catalogue' in a traditional tape-based backup. The catalogue existed because access time to the media was slow. So there had to be a way of knowing where the file is so you could load the right tape first time.

Another related issue is when the user does not know the name of the file they want and the current copy has been deleted. That situation also requires mounting various backup files to try to find the file you're looking for.

A catalogue would be a nice feature to have. Deleted files would have to be shown in a different colour or with a special icon so one catalogue could display all recoverable files even if they were not in the most recent backup.

[jprovine@bradley.edu]

I suspected I would have to load tapes in order to even look for the file that needs to be recovered, again this seems like it will be very time consuming

[tsightler]

Veeam effectively already has a catalog feature, as was mentioned above, you just need to enable guest file indexing on the job and the ability to search for files l, even across VMs and all restore points, including those on time, all become available in Veeam Enterprise Manager. Unfortunately, if you run your backups witht this feature these is no index/catalog.

[jprovine@bradley.edu]

I did not setup the backup jobs originally and who ever did, did not enable that feature. I would assume that it has to be done before the backup occurred but now a year later that is not going to help me. I also would assume it is necessary to load that a tape to search for the file information I need to restore. So I would load the tape, let the library find the tape and then I would be able to search the tape

[ejenner]

In most cases guest file indexing is enabled on the vast majority of my backups. Enterprise Manager gives you the ability to search for files with a free-text field but if you don't know the name of the file then you won't be able to find it like that. I've stopped using Enterprise Manager for restores and go straight to the B&R console as I've not been able to successfully locate files through Enterprise Manager.

We have to do a lot of restores of unknown file names, three times today so far. In each case I recovered a copy of the whole sub-folder so the user could pick out the individual files they recognized to copy them back into the live folder.

The real difficulty comes when the date isn't known, usually because the person requesting the restore isn't the person who deleted the file so they don't know when it happened. In this case I would mount the most recent restore point and see if the file is present. If not then mount the oldest to check if it is available at all. If it is available I'll pick a random restore point somewhere within our range of restore points to see if it's available. Then go earlier or later depending on the result. Eventually I'll find the latest copy of the deleted file with the unknown name.

We've got millions of files on our file server so you can imagine how long it takes to mount each individual restore point. A good 2 or 3 minutes each time.

I suppose Enterprise Manager was made to fill this gap but it does not work for me currently as it does not present a file catalogue. If I remember rightly it only gives you the ability to browse a server or search for a file name. Which isn't very easy if your file server is clustered.

[jprovine@bradley.edu]

Is there any performance hit and space loss caused by turning on indexing?

[ejenner]

If there is, it's negligible. I have it turned on for every job. If your system is on such a knife edge that it could be tipped by turning on guest indexing then you've got bigger things to worry about.

[jprovine@bradley.edu]

So other that being able to search more effectively, what other reasons should you turn it on. We really have very few requests for restores. I tried to find out why it was not enabled but the guy who has been managing it for the last few years didn't even know he could do it

[ejenner]

It allows you to search for files through the Enterprise Manager. If you're not using that and never plan to then it won't be of use.