Veeam’s Magical Ultility Extract.exe, Restore without the Original SQL DB
Yes the VBK file created by transform process at the end of the week/month is enough to recover the latest VM state.
You can even extract that VBK without Veeam server present. We ship a tiny extract.exe tool (look for it in the product installation folder). No matter which media you use to backup your VBK files, just remember to put this tool there as well, and you will be able to restore data from the backup file even in 10 years from now – provided that media is still functional.
You can restore whatever restore point with the VBK. There should be some more information, such as syntax, if you do a find for “extract” in our B&R Users Guide. (Page 97 & 98)Even if you lost the SQL backup, you could fire a new Veeam installation up (which takes less than 5 minutes) and do “Import Backup” and import your vbk/vrb/vib files and restore from those if you need other restore points.
The DB information is more about holding your job information and making sure your jobs run, you can import the data needed for restores from the files themselves.
So in other words, we really don’t need to backup Veeam SQL data and send to DR site as this extract.exe tool will be enough even we lose the whole production site. All we need is the latest VBK file.
Curious to know if anyone has done any VBK full DR restore of a VM using this extract tool. Is this significantly (quicker or) slower than Veeam B&R itself ?
I’m presuming that one needs access to the datastore/volumes where the VM is to reside, i.e. somewhere to restore to. Access to an NFS volume might be fine from Windows, but to a VMFS volume might invole some double handling.