Veeam Cloud Edition: Recovery with another installation

Veeam has recently released the Veeam Backup & Replication Cloud Edition. This new version basically consist of Veeam Backup & Replication + Cloud Backup. The main idea is that you will no longer have to offload your backups to tape but rather use a new media to do your offsite backups : cloud. First you will need to create a backup job. This will generate VBK/VRB/VIB/VBM files in your respository. These files are "portable". It means that you can copy them and import them in any other Veeam Backup & Replication Server. So I asked myself, how easy is it to recover from your the public cloud if everything is gone including your backup server. It turns out to be rather easy!

The first thing I did was create a bucket in our S3 compliant cloud (Eucalyptus Walrus Based). You can see in the screenshot that I just need to add the service point, query id and secret key (=~ server, login and password). Then I create a new bucket called "recoverybucket". In the top left corner you can see this is done on a server 10.x

Now lets create a backup plan using this "recoverybucket" account

Advanced mode was selected so that I could turn on encryption

I selected a backup that was produced by the job "Linux"

In the extension field I specified that only *.vbk and *.vbm (full backups and metadata) should be uploaded to the cloud.

And then finally encryption was enabled

Now it was time to do an upload test. After a successful upload test, the backup plan was deleted as well as the storage account from this 10.x backup server

Lets switch over to another site. Here I have installed a veeam backup server including cloud backup. You can see in the left corner that the RDP session is now connected to an 192.168.x address. The first thing we have to do is add the account. What is interesting is that the cloud edition will recognize the buckets that are linked to the account.

Then when you select the bucket it will warn you that it detects the other backup server. So choose to restore "another computer".

Now I am able to browse the repository. You can see that it even recognizes the whole "path".

So lets try to restore the whole directory where our Linux backup is stored.

Choose to do a one time restore

You can select latest version but I prefer to choose "Manually". Pick the version you like

Then select where you want to restore. I am using another directory because I don't have any F drive on my recovery location.

In the last step you need to enter your encryption key. For the fun I tried an invalid decryption key.

Using the invalid decryption key, the restore will fail as expected. This means that if you use encryption, your key is crucial for restores! Changing the key to the correct key allows the restore to run.

You have now restored the backup file back to a server. Of course if you want to use those backups you have to import them back in a backup server. There are two options here. You can just import them using the import button like shown below:

Or the other way is to create a recovery repository. Just add a new repository in Veeam B&R and point it to the restore directory.

In the final step, choose to import the existing backup automatically

Now the nice thing about this is that you can just rescan the repository if you do another restore to the same directory.

You can see that a backups restored from the cloud will be listed under "imported"

You can read more about Cloud Edition on the official website http://www.veeam.com/cloud-backup-vmware-hyper-v.html.