Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager allows you to browse the guest OS file system in a VM backup, search for guest OS files and restore necessary files.
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While browsing and search possibilities are available to all Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager users, file restore operations can be performed by authorized users only. |
By default, Veeam Backup & Replication uses its proprietary file indexing mechanism to index VM guest OS files and let you search for them in backups with Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager. To learn how to enable guest OS file system indexing in the backup job settings, refer to “Creating Backup Jobs: Enable Application-Aware Image Processing and Indexing” section of the Veeam Backup & Replication User Guide for the corresponding platform. When such a backup job is run, Veeam Backup & Replication creates a catalog (or index) of the VM guest OS files and stores index files on the Veeam backup server. After that, the Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager Catalog Service performs index replication – it aggregates index data for all VM image backups from managed backup servers. This consolidated index is stored on the Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager server in the C:\VBRCatalog\Index\ catalog and is used for search queries. Then you can browse or search through VM guest OS files, using the search criteria you need. Once you find a necessary file, you can use Veeam’s file-level restore to recover the file from the VM backup. See also the How Indexing Works section of this guide.
Note that even when VM backups are moved to an external storage device or tape, indexing data for such VMs remains in the catalog and is displayed in search results. (This capability is supported in Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions.) You can use the Import feature in Veeam Backup & Replication to import the backup to the backup server, and then recover the file. However, consider that by default, backup repository is the primary destination for the search. This means, in particular, that if a backup (with indexed guest) is stored in both locations - repository and tape - then Enterprise Manager search results will only include files from backup stored in repository. Files from tape-archived backup will appear in search results only if not found in the repository. For details, refer to Configuring Retention Settings section of this guide.
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You have an option to engage the Veeam Backup Search component and Microsoft Search Server in the indexing process - however, consider that this component is mainly intended for existing deployments of Veeam Backup & Replication, providing for backward compatibility. The Veeam Backup Search component from the installation package should be in this case installed on a machine running Microsoft Search Server. The Veeam Backup Search server runs the MOSS Integration Service that invokes updates of index databases on Microsoft Search Server. Veeam Backup Search uses Microsoft Search Server functionality to crawl aggregated index files in the Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager catalog and create a content index on the Search Server that is used to process search queries. The service also sends search queries to Microsoft Search Server which processes them and returns necessary search results to Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager. See also the Appendix B. Installing Veeam Backup Search (optional) section of this guide. Consider, however, that using Veeam's proprietary mechanism for indexing and search is the best practice. |
