MABS - Online Recovery - specific disk only?

Question

Hi!

We're using MABS to backup the VM's in our Hyper-V cluster.

We store the backups locally on a disk in the Azure Backup Server for a few weeks and after that only in the Azure cloud.

When I restore from "Disk" I can choose which disk I want to restore, even double click the disk and restore individual files directly.

When I restore from "Online" I don't have an option to restore a specific disk. I can only choose to restore the entire Hyper-V VM. Why is that?! Why isn't there an option to select the specific .vhdx disk I need?

Now it's downloading all the disks for the VM, which will take a very long time for no real reason.

Thanks!

P-H

Answer 1

@P-H Gustavsson Apologies for delay in getting back to you.
Greatly appreciate your time and patience!

Q1 Answer: Resorting individual disk from the online recovery point of the VM backup, falls under item level restore (ILR). ILR from cloud recovery is currently not possible. We plan to support this in future. There is no ETA on when it will be available.

Unfortunately, there is no workaround you need to restore the entire VM from online recovery points (RP).

Q2 Answer: AFAIK, this is expected. DPM does not do the check as it is unaware of size on Azure.

Hope this answers your queries. Feel free to post if you have further questions in the matter.

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Answer 2

Hi @P-H Gustavsson

I've a similar query under a more recent post to this forum here.

I also find the lack of 'Item Level Restore' capability in Online recovery points to be a big drawback for this product.

Did you ever find a suitable work around?

Thank you for any input or feed back you can provide.

Regards,
Jason.

Answer 3

I just love how they market these products and don't mention the massive caveats. You literally have to spend a load of time and money implementing them to then discover some massive obvious omission like not being able to recover individual items from the cloud backup. Why not just say that to begin with ?

It's like how google say that users"can move files from My Drive to a Shared Drive", without explaining that they literally mean files, and that moving folders isn't possible. arrrgh. You're all a bunch of useless cowboys/kids.

Answer 4

Yep - hearin' ya. MABs/DPM is yet another product that is 80% nearly what you want, but the 20% missing is a deal breaker. This sh$t does indeed get very tiresome...

Since our MABs experience in January '21, we've been performing PoC's with other products and have settled on Veeam. It does ILR from cloud no worries, and has an MSP offering which works for us too.

Also Veeam's ability to perform synthetic full backups to Azure blob (or AWS) from a cloud hosted VM is an ideal way of working around poor Internet bandwidth here in regional Australia. In other words, we can trickle daily incremental backups from on-prem over a small pipe to a cloud hosted VM. From there we can then do the bigger weekly / monthly / yearly full backups direct to long term storage.

Hope this helps CarlFarrington-5648.