Quick Rollback

When you restore a full VM or VM hard disk to the original location, you can instruct Veeam Backup & Replication to perform quick rollback — incremental data restore. Instead of restoring an entire VM or VM disk from a backup file, Veeam Backup & Replication will recover only those data blocks that are necessary to revert the VM or VM disk to an earlier point in time. Quick rollback significantly reduces the recovery time and has little impact on the production environment.

To perform quick rollback, Veeam Backup & Replication uses the VMware Changed Block Tracking technology. Veeam Backup & Replication queries VMware Sphere to get CBT information for the current VM state and compares it with the CBT information in a backup file. This way, Veeam Backup & Replication detects what data blocks must be transported back to rebuild the VM or VM disk to an earlier point in time.

It is recommended that you use quick rollback if you restore a VM or VM disk after a problem that has occurred at the level of the VM guest OS: for example, there has been an application error or a user has accidentally deleted a file on the VM guest OS. Do not use quick rollback if the problem has occurred at the VM hardware level, storage level or due to a power loss.

Requirements for Quick Rollback

To use incremental restore, make sure that the following requirements are met:

1. VM or VM disk is restored to its original location.
2. CBT is enabled for the VM disk or all disks of a VM you plan to restore.
3. The backup file from which you plan to restore a VM or a VM disk is created with the Changed block tracking option enabled.

Limitations for Quick RollBack

1. Use VM guest OS file exclusion and Quick Rollback wisely. If you exclude specific files and folders from the VM guest OS during backup and use Quick Rollback to restore the VM or VM disk from such backup, Veeam Backup & Replication will restore only the content of the backup file; the excluded data will not be restored. For example, if you exclude C:\Folder from the backup, data for this folder will not be backed up and will not be available in the resulting backup file. After some time, data in C:\Folder may change but the folder will still not be backed up (since the job excludes this folder). For this reason, when you perform Quick Rollback, Veeam Backup & Replication will restore all data that have changed except the excluded C:\Folder.
2. Incremental restore can be performed in the Direct NFS access, Virtual Appliance, Network transport mode. The Direct SAN access transport mode cannot be used for the incremental restore due to VMware limitations.
3. You cannot run two incremental restore sessions subsequently. After you perform incremental restore for a VM, the CBT on the original VM is reset. You must perform at least one incremental backup to be able to perform incremental restore again.

During the backup job session after quick rollback, Veeam Backup & Replication will read all data of the original VM since the CBT on the original VM is reset.

Related Topics

• Performing Full VM Restore
• Restoring VM Hard Disks