The Veeam Cookbook Series

A simple step by step no frills approach to achieving your goal

Recipe: Performing File-Level Recovery

Expected deliverables:

Individual Files or Folders in the EC2 Instance recovered at the time of backup state.

Time to complete: 10 minutes

Ingredients:

  • An AWS EC2 cloud-native snapshot or image-level backup
  • A Worker Configuration in the same region and availability zone where the EC2 instances files will be restored.
  • The protected EC2 Instance must have a supported file system (FAT, FAT32, NTFS, ext2, ext3, ext4, XFS, Btrfs )
  • If you plan to restore files to the original location, make sure the instance is powered on. In addition, the SSM Agent must be installed on the source instance and the instance must be configured to communicate with AWS System Manager.
  • To restore to Linux-based VMs, only systemd-based distributions are supported.
  • To restore to a Windows-based VMs, Windows Management Framework (WMF) 5.1 must be installed.

Before you start: Veeam Backup for AWS does not support restore of files and folders stored on EBS volumes with Windows-native Data Deduplication enabled Make sure the machine where you plan to open the File-Level Restore browser is allowed to access the worker instances over the internet (TCP 443).

Assumptions:

You have an existing Veeam Backup for AWS deployment, and backups of one or more AWS EC2 Instances.

Method:

  1. Login the Veeam Backup for AWS web interface.
  2. Navigate to Protected Data > EC2. Select the EC2 instance whose files and folders you want to recover, and click Restore > File-level Recovery.
  3. At the Instances step, select a restore point that will be used to recover files and folders (by default the most recent restore point). Click Next.
  4. At the Restore Mode step, you can choose whether you want to restore files and folders to the original location, and to deploy worker instances in the production account. By fefault, Veeam provides only the option to download the restored files.
    • To restore files and folders to the original EC2 instance, enable the Additional restore mode option. Veeam will use the IAM role attached to the source instance.
    • Leave other options by default and click in Next.
  5. At the Reason step, specify a reason for recovering files and folders. Click Next.
  6. At the Summary step, review summary information and click Finish.
  7. As soon as you click Finish, Veeam will close the File-level Recovery wizard, start a recovery session and display the FLR Running Sessions window.
  8. In the FLR Running Sessions window, in the URL column of the window, Veeam will display a link. Click the link to open the File-Level Restore browser on your local machine.
  9. In the File-Level Restore browser:
    • Navigate to a folder that contains the necessary files
    • In the working area, select check boxes next to the files and folders you want to restore and click Add to Restore List. Do this for all Files and folders you want to restore.
    • Switch to the Restore List tab, review the list of items to recover
    • Select check boxes next to the items, and click Download to download the files and folders to your local machine.
    • Or click in Restore>Keep or Restore>Overwrite in case you want to restore to the original location keeping or overwriting the source files..
  10. After you finish working with the File-Level Restore browser, click Stop Recovery Session in the FLR Running Sessions window to finish the process.

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