Read the full series:
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Ch.1 – Architecture & Requirements |
Ch.9 – Volume recovery |
In our previous post we discussed file-level recoveries. Besides recovering individual files, you also have the ability to recover entire volumes. Note that this only works when you have chosen the Entire PC or the Volume Level Backup methods. When you perform volume-level recovery, Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE restores the entire content of the volume.
Again you have three possibilities (actually four but I’ll come back to that later…) to get to your volume level recoveries. Typing in Veeam in the start menu and selecting Volume Restore, right-click on the tray icon and select Restore – Entire Volumes or directly in the UI select a recovery point and press the restore volumes button.
A volume can be restored to its original location or to a new location. If you restore the volume to its original location, Veeam Endpoint Backup overwrites the original volume. If you restore the volume to a new location, volume can be manually allocated either on disk’s empty space or by replacing the existing volumes. In second case Veeam Endpoint Backup overwrites data in the target location with data retrieved from the backup. However, there are few limitations for volume-level recovery:
- You cannot restore the system volume to its original location.
- You cannot restore a volume to the volume on which the swap file is currently hosted.
- You cannot restore a volume to the volume where the backup file used for restore is located.
To overcome the said limitations you can to use Veeam Recovery Media (we explained how to create it here) and use the Veeam Bare Metal Recovery wizard for volume-level restore. We will dive into this in our next post.
The wizard is again very easy to use. Depending on the location of your backups you choose that location, remote storage or even Veeam Backup & Replication server and then you will get to the point where you can do the disk mapping
You can choose the different volumes that you want to restore by selecting the checkbox. By default, we will recover to their initial location. If you want to change that you click the Customize disk mapping link. In this window, you can specify how volumes need to get restored.
Please note that during manual disk mapping you can erase the existing volumes, so please be attentive while performing this operation – otherwise it could lead to data loss. A small hint though, volume erase happens during the recovery process and if you changed your mind or not sure what to do – it is safe to cancel disk mapping or even close the volume recovery wizard.
You have the following options during manual disk mapping
- Apply Backup Layout: select this option if you want to apply to disk the settings that were used on your computer at the moment when you performed backup.
- Apply Disk Layout: select this option if you want to apply to the current disk settings of another disk.
- Erase: select this option if you want to discard the current disk settings.
After that, you can finish the recovery process and your volumes will be restored.
Conclusion
Backing up is one thing, restoring is another. Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE gives you the possibility to do file-level (discussed in previous post) and volume recoveries. Both options are very powerful and give you all what is needed to safely recovery your data.
In case you can’t restore the volume because of the limitations, you still have the possibility to boot to the Veeam Recovery Media and do it from there. This will also give you the possibility to do a Bare Metal Recovery and we are going to go through those details in a next post.
For more information, watch the video.
Read the next chapter:
- Ch.10 – Recovery media in depth
See Also