Comparing guest file lists between backups

[mattinx]

Occasionally I get a request from a user that goes something like "I think I've deleted a folder under $path, but I don't remember what it was called". Usually it's pretty straightforward to find, but the odd one involves digging through a deep directory tree trying to work out what's missing.

Given that Veeam has the backups and guest filesystem indices for the fileserver VMs, is there a way to generate a report of the differences between either a) a specified backup and the live filesystem; or b) two different backups? Even if it just reported files that were present in the backup but not the live filesystem would be a big help, but showing all differences would be great.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Matt,

There is no built-in functionality to address this use case, however you may want to try leveraging our advanced search guest files capabilities available in the Backup Enterprise Manager, might help.

Thanks for the feedback anyway.

[mattinx]

Hi Vitaliy,

That was the first thing I tried, unfortunately it doesn't help in this case as the end-user can't tell me anything about the folder in question. Perhaps this is something to consider as a feature request

If there's anyone else out there with the same issue, the current work-round I use is to spin up the backup in a virtual lab and use WinMerge (see http://winmerge.org/ ) to do a folder-level comparison between the VM in the virtual lab and the production system. It's not perfect (it can't catch files/folders that are inside a folder that the currently logged in user doesn't have access to), but it gets part way there.