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How Restore to Amazon EC2 Works

You can perform restore to Amazon EC2 from backups of EC2 instances, virtual and physical machines. To upload backed-up data to Amazon EC2, Veeam Backup & Replication may use an auxiliary EC2 instance — a proxy appliance. Veeam Backup & Replication deploys the proxy appliance in Amazon EC2 only for the duration of the restore process and removes it immediately after that.

Depending on the type of backups you are restoring from and their location, the proxy appliance may be required or optional. The proxy appliance is required when you restore from:

Backups of EC2 instances that are stored in external repositories.
Backups of virtual and physical machines that are stored in object storage repositories.

The proxy appliance is optional when you restore from backups of virtual and physical machines stored in backup repositories, or backups of EC2 instances copied to backup repositories with backup copy jobs. It is recommended, however, to use the proxy appliance in scenarios where it is optional, as the proxy appliance may significantly improve restore performance. You can specify the proxy appliance settings at the Proxy Appliance step of the Restore to Amazon EC2 wizard.

The workflow of the restore process depends on whether the proxy appliance is used or not.

How Restore to Amazon EC2 Works Note:

If you installed Plug-in for Veeam Backup for AWS, and the Veeam Backup for AWS appliance is present in the Veeam Backup & Replication infrastructure, you do not need the proxy appliance. Also, restore to Amazon EC2 works as described in the Entire EC2 Instance Restore section in the Veeam Backup for AWS User Guide.

Restoring to Amazon EC2 with Proxy Appliance

If the proxy appliance is required or you selected to use it for restore to Amazon EC2, Veeam Backup & Replication performs the following operations:

Veeam Backup & Replication creates a proxy appliance in Amazon EC2.

During the restore process, the proxy appliance communicates with backup infrastructure components over the SSH protocol and the network redirector that is deployed on the proxy appliance.

For every disk of a backed-up machine, Veeam Backup & Replication creates an empty EBS volume in Amazon EC2.
Veeam Backup & Replication hot-adds empty disks to the proxy appliance and restores backed-up data to the EBS volumes.
Veeam Backup & Replication creates a target instance in Amazon EC2.
Veeam Backup & Replication detaches the EBS volumes from the proxy appliance and attaches them to the target instance.
After the restore process is complete, Veeam Backup & Replication removes the proxy appliance from Amazon EC2.

Restoring to Amazon EC2 without Proxy Appliance

If you selected not to use the proxy appliance for restore to Amazon EC2, Veeam Backup & Replication performs the following operations:

Veeam Backup & Replication uploads disks of a backed-up machine to Amazon S3.

In Amazon S3, the uploaded disks are stored to the temporary bucket in the RAW format.

Veeam Backup & Replication imports the backed-up data from the temporary bucket in Amazon S3 to EBS volumes in Amazon EC2.
Veeam Backup & Replication creates a target instance in Amazon EC2 and attaches the EBS volumes to it.
After the import process is complete, Veeam Backup & Replication removes the temporary bucket from Amazon S3.