There are times that Shadow Copy restores don't meet the recovery needs. As a reminder, Shadow Copies are taken at 7:00 and 12:00. Our daily backup schedule is listed below.
Limitations are files created after the last shadow copy (for mapped drives) or created between backups and deleted.
On Premises
Replication - All Mission Critical or Important VM's are replicated to our Veeam Backup Server. This is done at 4:30 PM daily and typically completes before 8:00 PM. We are able to restore individual files or entire VM's using this solution. These are kept for 5 days.
Backup - This is split into 2 jobs (DJI-Daily_Critical_Servers and DJI_Daily_Non_Critical_Servers) and starts at 10:00 PM. Both jobs keep a history of 7 days.
When restoring data from Veeam, the on-prem options are much quicker.
Off Site
Following completion of the Backup Jobs, there are 2 offsite jobs (named the same as the backup jobs with _Offsite at the end). The critical one goes first. These can take until mid morning or later depending on the size of the changes day to day or network speed limitations.
Note that these jobs maintain a Daily (7 days) + Weekly, Monthly and Yearly backups. Restoring from these is MUCH slower.
Initiating a Data Restore - Please contact Brian or Ryan for login information and review until you are fully trained
Login to our backup server (10.10.1.5, contact Brian or Ryan for login information).
Then launch DJI-Veeam-CC (if needed contact Brian or Ryan for login information).
If Veeam is not running, click the Veeam Backup and Recovery icon:
The home menu will show you the current state of any running jobs and allow you to restore individual files or entire virtual machines.
NOTE do not restore or failover a VM without being in contact with Brian, Ryan or Vieth consulting. This could result in a loss of production data and is only used in a disaster recovery situation.
To restore individual files, first determine the timeframe you need to look for the file. Using the job schedule above, choose the appropriate location (replica, backup or offsite backup).
The recovery method is the same regardless of what source you choose. In this case we will restore a file located in the IT Share. Note you can restore entire directories or multiple files as needed. Veeam also allows you to restore files from any backed up VM.
Restore a file:
Choose VMWare vSphere from the Restore option:
Then choose Replica or Backup, in this case we will choose Replica:
Chose Guest Files Restore
Then Microsoft Windows:
Choose the Job Name DJI Replication v3 and the VM you need to restore from, in this case choose DC1 and click next (the v2 job has no associated data available):
Pick your restore point and click Next:
Provide a reason and click Next:
You'll see a summary, click Browse. Note that loading this can take some time.
You can then browse to the file location:
You have several options with files, including overwriting, keeping both the restored and current version in the original location, or copying it to a new location. You can also compare with production and show attributes (not commonly used). Choosing Keep restores the file with a new name and allows the user to compare files if needed. If the file was previously deleted, you can choose either Overwrite or Keep.
Veeam names the file with RESTORED + a time stamp.
Please reach out to Brian or Ryan with any questions.