Veeam File Restore and Permissions (I)

Yesterday I was wondering about restoring guest files with Veeam B&R and their corresponding file permissions. So I thought to myself, lets just test it out. The test contained a Windows file restore as well as a Linux file restore which I will discuss in part 2

For the windows machine I started with a machine called SP1. To do a successful test we have to create a file with special permissions. In this example we will add a local user "localtestuser" to the access list. This user has only be defined locally. You can also see that the "Date modified" is 15:13

After the permission is set, we kick off a new backup so that we can start a Windows Guest File Restore.

When you start the Windows Guest File Restore, you can easily browse and find the file. If you right click the file and click the properties option you can see that the permission are intact. Because "localtestuser" is not known by the B&R server, the ACL entry is shown by its UID. If you want to restore a windows file, you have two options. "Copy to" or "Restore to the original location".

Let us start by testing the restore to original location. Select the file and click restore.

This will restore the file to its original location in the original VM.

In my case the original file was still in place. You can see that Veeam has renamed the original file and then restored the text file. If we look at both ACL lists, we can see that B&R has succesfully restored the permissions. You can also see that the "Date modified" is in both case 15:13 as you would expect.

Now let us try the "Copy to" option

If you select the copy to option, you can see a check-box to preserve the permissions. Obviously we check it as we want to preserve the permissions. In this case, we are restoring to a local folder c:\restore on the backup server.

If we check the permissions after the restore, you can see that the permissions are successfully restored. Again the UID shows up and the "Date modified" is correct.

We can conclude that Windows Guest File Restores, do restore the file permissions succesfully