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Scenario: A user submits an urgent ticket - a very important folder has been deleted from the file server.

IT will ask ‘when is the last time you saw that folder?’ and they usually don’t know.

So, I fire up Veeam Backup and Replication. Click Restore > Microsoft Hyper-V > From backup > Guest file restore > Microsoft Windows.

I’ll (randomly) pick a backup from 2 days ago. Wait (forever) for the backup to spin up; then navigate to where the folder should be, only to find it’s not there. So I close it and spin up a different backup set. I’ll keep doing this until I eventually find the folder and restore it. This takes forever.

Is there a faster way to do this?

Hi ​@ec13,

there absolutely is. Try the Enterprise Manager. You have to enable Guest File System Indexing in the backup for the specific VM Backup Job and when you use Enterprise Manager the EM searches your file in an index database instead of the actual backup data.

You can one-click restore from there as well. You can also use a kind of quick search bar. Check this out:

Guest OS File Restore - Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager Guide

 

Best

Lukas

​@lukas.k thank you! Can’t believe I am just now learning about this. I will definitely check it out.

There are so many times we're I see this option enabled on servers where it's not necessary, but this is one of those cases where guest indexing is exactly what you're looking for! 

This is one of the things I pull my hair out over. I’m aware of EM but like Tommy said it needs guest indexing on and then loads the source server which is a pita. Wouldn’t it be nice it guest indexing could be a post processing activity, as in Veeam mounts the backup and walks the file system outside of backup hours. This would then allow me do do all sorts of fancy stuff for file recovery like searches (similar to EM) and even have a browse window that showed me what was on the server on a specific date and allow me to move backwards and forwards in time, select the files I want to restore and then Veeam can do the rest.

Can I raise this as a feature request?

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