Edit backup file contents

[amccloud]

Assuming a legitimate need, is it possible within Veeam to edit existing backup files to remove a single file? In other words, can you remove a single file from any backups which may contain it?

[Egor Yakovlev]

Greetings, Anthony!

You cannot manually alter backup files in any shape or form, and in many legal cases where production data was altered\crippled backups are used as a proof.
As for compliance, it is possible to remove necessary data from a VM while it is being recovered to production - especially for legal cases, like GDPR's "Right to be forgotten" for example, we have Veeam Staged Restore option available.

Hope that helps!

[amccloud]

Yep, understood on the legal issues. I'm asking more from a software feature perspective. The ability to browse backup data and delete individual files from it is already a feature in another backup product. Might be a feature to look into. Thanks!

[Vitaliy S.]

If you can do that, then you can never be sure that all your data is protected, especially if you need to create a report to the owner of the VM/application etc.

[soncscy]

The ability to browse backup data and delete individual files from it is already a feature in another backup product.

Which product, out of curiosity?

To be honest, I can't imagine how this is a feature and not a design flaw; what are the situations you've encountered where you want mutable backups?

I am not trying to attack here, but I just honestly cannot think of a situation in which I want my backups tampered with...for absolutely every situation I can imagine, an audit trail and strict account control for the backups seems preferable to me.

[amccloud]

Hey sorry for the delay, I was out of town for a bit. It's a feature in CV. https://documentation.commvault.com/com ... ng_job.htm

And nah it's not an attack, it's a question. I get it. I'm not in favor of it, and I can't provide an example of why this would be needed. I'm not even sure how this could NOT be legal issue. But again, the feature exists elsewhere, which tells me someone at sometime thought this would be a good idea.

[Gostev]

It would not appear as if this functionality is supported for image-level backups though, which is what Veeam uses? I can certainly see how easy it would be implement for legacy agent-based file-level backups, when each backed up file is stored individually in the backup repository. However, it's really not how you want to backup modern workloads, due to backup and recovery time implications?