Item-Level Recovery

for Tier-1 business

applications
Kirsten Stoner
Product Strategy Coordinator
Item-Level Recovery: Tier-1 workloads CANNOT be exempt

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Why is Item-Level Recovery Important? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

What is Item-Level Recovery? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Microsoft Exchange Workloads . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Microsoft SharePoint Workloads . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Active Directory Workloads . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Microsoft SQL Workloads: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Oracle Database . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Item-level recovery from a Storage Snapshot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Restores for any situation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Can item-level recovery be fast and easy? It should, its Important! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

About Veeam Software . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

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Introduction
Organizations today are at a crossroads where there are incredible demands from the Always-On
Enterprise to provide 24/7 operations, support for growing amounts of data while having no patience
for downtime or data loss. This can be referred to as the Always-On data center and to meet its goals,
it is crucial to maintain the applications, services and workloads that run inside. These applications are
where battle lines are drawn between Availability expectations and the reality of the recovery options
today. In this paper, we will highlight key item level and application recovery techniques and how you
can use them to enhance the Availability of your most critical applications.

24/7

Why is Item-Level Recovery Important?

Above all, item-level recovery is important for the Always-On Enterprise to avoid data loss. Item level
recovery allows users to restore just an item, instead of the whole database, allowing them to keep their
production environment in the most recent state. This helps avoid data loss as you dont run the risk
of restoring data that doesnt need to be restored. This can happen in a number of situations, but one
example that resonates well is a shared database. A database server can host many applications and
when a recovery situation occurs, there is an important decision as to what and how much data needs
recovered. If the entire database server needs recovered, there could be data loss to other applications,
even if it is within the negotiated Recovery Point Objective (RPO). Restoring an entire database from a
backup that was taken two hours previously still runs the risk of losing data for the business. The same
goes for different users of a mail system. Why should all users be impacted from an isolated failure or from
one users error? This logic repeats itself for many applications in the data center today.

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What is Item-Level Recovery?

Item-level recovery allows you to recover a single item, object or file without having to recover the
whole virtual machine. This allows users to restore just the item that was deleted right back into
the production machine, allowing them to keep the most consistent state of the VM. If an end user
accidentally deletes a document from their machine, it can easily be recovered with an item-level
restore. This wouldnt even disrupt the users productivity or computer, and no data loss would need
to occur. Veeam Backup & Replication provides the ability to perform item-level restores easily and
efficiently. Veeam will look at the image level backup and from there users can find and select the file
they need to recover, with the options of overwriting the existing file or keeping it (if still there). The
figure below takes a look at what you would see when using the Veeam File Level Restore wizard.

Instant file-level restore is available for any virtualized file system, with Veeam Backup & Replication
taking a different approach for each of the different systems.

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Item-level recovery is often needed for tier-1 workloads that are most commonly used by organizations.
When deploying tier-1 applications, most administrators choose to go virtual for many reasons, including
reducing hardware dependency, consolidating workloads, portability and the ability to improve application
performance. Each application workload has its own fail-safe mechanisms incorporated for item-level
recovery. For every admin, this might be the first resort when recovering an item, otherwise a backup solution
would be beneficial for when things take a turn for the worse. For your business to remain Always-On with no
data loss, it is imperative to have a good Availability solution in place that will recognize these applications. An
application-consistent backup tool is beneficial when it comes to applications such as Microsoft Exchange,
SharePoint, SQL Server, Active Directory and Oracle. In select restore scenarios or while being backed up,
these data sources need to remain online, as these applications and databases can be critical to running an
organization and a tool that provides granular recovery of these applications can help improve recovery time
objectives, or RTOs. For organizations, sometimes these data sources dont necessarily need to be recovered in
their entirety and if fully restored, could potentially lead to downtime and data loss. Item-level recovery gives
administrators the option to restore one or more items from the backup without going offline. A full virtual
machine restore may be necessary, but if not, wouldnt it be easier to perform a simple item-level recovery?

Different utilities can help with item-level recovery and provide Availability for your data center. An
application-consistent backup tool can ensure you capture all data and transactions. This tool will utilize
Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS) to coordinate the conversations between backup applications,
business applications and the storage hardware or software management. VSS does all of this without
taking the applications offline, allowing you to have an application-consistent backup that captures all
the data and transactions that are in process.

Instead of restoring the whole tier-1 application workload, which is very time consuming and in most
cases unnecessary, Veeam offers application-specific Explorers allowing you to restore individual items
from their applications in the form of their native database types. Therefore, providing the ability to
open a database from a backup allows users to search for the exact items they need. Additionally,
opening up the item in the Explorer verifies it is exactly what needs to be recovered. The following will
describe specific application workloads and how you can utilize Veeam to perform item-level recovery

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Microsoft Exchange Workloads

Microsoft Exchange is used in many organizations worldwide. Exchange acts as a channel for
communication, collaboration and scheduling allowing it to often consume a systems resources
including operations like CPU, mailbox tasks and background work. Today, there are many guides
available about administering and virtualizing Exchange. It is important to look at different guides
to ensure that your Exchange server has enough resources to perform properly and meet an
organizations goals. This includes developing a good backup plan or strategy in case something were
to go wrong. Learning the skills to manage the different workloads around Exchange and be able to
preserve a users experience while using the application will prove valuable to your business. It will be
valuable not only in giving Exchange enough resources, but also to be able to quickly bounce back
from a failure will be beneficial in achieving 24.7.365 Availability.

With many users working with email (Exchange) operations, it is extremely common to have natural
human error. Deleted emails, lost contacts, or finding a file that was attached to an email can be difficult
to find and recover if lost. To avoid data loss, it is imperative to look into item-level recovery options.
Microsoft Exchange contains a large amount of data that is valuable to organizations including emails,
tasks, contacts, documents and more. If an employee leaves the company and their mailbox was not
archived or a user deletes an important email, not having this data may become an issue for the company,
especially if this former employee handled important data and contacts. When trying to retrieve this data,
one may first think of restoring the whole database instead of an individuals mailbox or single email.
Rather than performing a full database restore, it would be easier to perform an item-level restore. Item-
level recovery offers you the ability to restore single mailboxes or even individual emails, contacts, and
calendar appointments without having to restore the whole VM. Having to perform a whole VM restore
could lead to business disruptions and downtime. Along with many other Microsoft application systems,
Exchange has its own safety net for item-level recovery. Before digging into your backup software, you
can use the Exchange Recycle Bins to restore objects for the last seven days. However, for longer periods
of time Veeam can help by providing the tools needed to perform item-level recovery.

Veeam allows you to take an application-consistent backup and then from the backup gain the ability
to perform item-level restores. Veeam Backup & Replication creates and maintains backup files as
an image in Veeam backup files (.VBK), an increment (.VIB or .VRB) and as metadata (.VBM). Veeam
gives you the option not only to restore whole VMs, but individual items including mailboxes, folders,
messages, tasks and more. Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange can open the database backup
file without doing a full restore, allowing you to look at all the items it contains. By gaining the ability
to open the Exchange database through the Veeam Explorer, browsing and searching through its
contents have never been easier. The eDiscovery tool enables users to search for items using a specified
keyword while also providing advanced find capabilities. To add to your search, this tool can estimate
the size of the query results based on the selected criteria allowing you to refine your search. This
feature also provides a detailed export report on what has been exported from Veeam Explorer for

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Microsoft Exchange.

Individual items can be recovered as an .MSG, and .PST, you can open up the file, and you can restore it
back into the Exchange database. Veeam Explorer shows the inside of the Exchange .EDB database file
from within the Veeam Backup file. Figure 1 demonstrates the view inside Veeam Explorer for Microsoft
Exchange. In this example, the explorer is demonstrating the advanced find feature. As you can see you
are able to search the database from certain criteria. In the bottom left hand corner you can see how
many items are included in the search and the approximate size of the query. When you find and click
the item needing restored, a drop down menu is shown, displaying the various restore scenarios.

You can find plenty of key ways to protect Exchange, here are some of our favorites:

Tips and tricks for backing up Exchange DAGs: http://andyandthevms.com/exchange-dag-

vmware-backups-updated-list-of-tips-and-tricks-for-veeam-backup-replication/
Everything you need to know about Exchange Backups:
http://www.gfi.com/blog/best-practices-for-virtualizing-exchange-part-1-vmware/

Virtualization tips For Exchange: http://www.virtualizationadmin.com/blogs/lowe/news/

xxx-virtualization-tips-exchange-administrators.html

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Microsoft SharePoint Workloads

Microsoft SharePoint is a tool that allows organizations to share documents, team sites, calendars and
other important information. In some cases, SharePoint may be hosted, but it also can be deployed
locally onsite. Microsoft SharePoint is utilized throughout entire organizations, across different
departments and offices allowing it to be prone to human error. Since this application is utilized
throughout the whole organization, the database for SharePoint can be very large and critical to a
business operations. Depending on the permissions given to each user, users can edit team sites,
calendars, upload documents and add or delete items. Versioning allows team members to collaborate
and make changes to documents without the fear of overwriting a previous version. This is because
the feature automatically saves every version of the document, so if necessary users have the ability to
revert to a previous version. If this option is not available when an item is accidentally deleted or lost,
your next response would be to look in the Recycle Bin SharePoint includes. If the item is no longer in
the bin, then Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SharePoint is the ideal tool for avoiding data loss.

Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SharePoint makes item-level recovery for your workloads fast and easy,
especially in cases when the entire VM is not needed. Similar to Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange,
you can easily browse the SharePoint database and find the item you need to restore. With this Explorer,
users can save documents and lists to a selected folder, send them as email attachments, or restore
them to the Microsoft SharePoint Database. This tool also gives the ability to export libraries and lists
for further import to SharePoint databases and restore sites and site collections. Being able to perform
a full site restore will allow users to reduce recovery times when a large SharePoint disaster occurs. Site
recovery can bring back many documents or items that could have been lost if deleted or corrupted.

The item-level recovery process is simplified by providing the ability to browse, search and restore
items from the SharePoint database. With large amounts of data, content, documents, etc. being placed
in this database, the ability to use advanced search methods to find your item will help save time and
headaches (that is, of course, assuming you know the name of the item). A search field, located at the
top of the screen, directly below the toolbar, gives you the ability to quickly search for items.

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The Explorer also allows you to perform list and item permission restore enabling users to restore
content back to the original or to a different SharePoint Server. An additional component of Veeam
Explorer for Microsoft SharePoint is the ability to remote stage SQL server for restore tasks. This can help
when the SharePoint database has outgrown the SQL Server Express default that is included in Veeam
Backup & Replication, allowing users to eliminate the need to license additional SQL instances.

Active Directory Workloads

Active Directory is without a doubt the most used solution for data center authentication and
authorization. Active Directory allows you to have all your users authorized and connected in the same
Windows domain network. For most organizations, the Active Directory database is robust consisting
of multiple users, computer accounts, containers and organizational units. All of these objects are
critical to the daily operations and tasks of running a business. Businesses use Active Directory daily as
soon as they log in to their computers, so if a user accidentally gets deleted, how disruptive will that
be to operations? It is good to note that Microsoft Active Directory comes with a Recycle Bin feature
(similar to the recycle bins previously mentioned). All you need to do is enable this feature within the
application. The Recycle Bin is designed to help minimize downtime and preserve the database by not
having to recover objects from the backup. If you have not enabled the Recycle Bin in Active Directory
or the bin does not contain the object you are looking for, you can turn to other solutions such as
Veeam to recover items and provide enhanced Availability for your tier-1 applications.

Veeam Explorer for Active Directory helps granularly recover many different Active Directory items. The
explorer retrieves the backup file and then mounts the database allowing users to browse and search
for individual users, containers, or objects in the database. Before using this tool, the Explorer will need
full access to the Active directory database files for item recovery. From this explorer you are able to
restore changed or deleted users, group accounts, passwords for users, group or computer accounts,
Organization Units (OUs), Group Policy Objects (GPOs), individual configuration partition records and
much more. This allows users to bypass having to restore the whole Virtual machine, especially if its not
needed allowing them to hit those RTOs.

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With just a couple clicks inside the restore wizard, the Explorer will open the database and expose all of the
items in the backup. Similar to the other Explorers, there is an advanced search option that allows you to
quickly find your items. This Explorer enables you to export Active Directory objects and user-attributed data
from a backup into an LDIFDE format or complete an Active Directory object restore directly back into the
production database. To add, another feature that proves valuable to users is that they can utilize this Explorer
to compare their live environment and see what has changed or been deleted. This can save time while
troubleshooting especially if a user was deleted accidentally without realizing it.

As the above screenshot identifies, Veeam Explorer for Active Directory makes it easy to explore a
database and look for users to restore. You can export users to the desktop, choose a new location, or
restore right back into the database. Veeam Explorer for Active Directory makes item-level recovery
easier, even for beginners.

Take a look at how Veeam has helped these administrators restore Active Directory:

Veeam Rescues 1400 computer objects in AD: http://tsmith.co/2014/veeam-rescues-

140-computer-objects-in-ad/

Veeam Active Directory Restore in Action: http://www.educationalcentre.co.uk/veeam-v8-

active-directory-restore-wizard-action/

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Microsoft SQL Workloads:

Microsoft SQL Server is also widely used and relied upon in data centers today for storing and retrieving data for
critical applications and business systems. SQL Servers can carry databases for workloads ranging from very small
to enterprise-level type workloads. These servers often carry multiple SQL database instances that are critical to
organizations. An important part of a SQL database is the transaction log. A transaction log records all transactions
and changes made by the database.

Microsoft SQL Server contains multiple databases and logs that can rely on each other for transporting or reading
data. This can get complicated when trying to restore a single log or table because these logs and tables correlate
with other data in the database. In the case of a failure with native tools, the transaction log may be needed to
restore your database back to a compatible state. You can use the transaction logs in SQL workload to restore
items, but the time you have to do this is limited. For other cases, a database may require a full recovery that may
lead to downtime or data loss. To achieve high availability for SQL Server, you will have to restore to a point in
time, therefore restoring the transaction log may be the best case.

Often, when things start to go wrong in a SQL database, the natural course of action is to restore the whole
database from the last full backup. However, thats not enough for every situation, or the best solution in some
cases. Database administrators may need to investigate the database further and find the specific time or
transaction that started the disruption. Once found, Veeam Explorer for SQL Server can assist in effectively any
situation. Veeam Explorer for SQL Server allows you to perform transaction-level recovery and restore to a precise
point in time achieving low recovery point and time objectives (RTPO). In the event you need to restore an
item from a SQL backup, Veeam can assist by mounting the database within the Explorer so you can find what
you need to restore. Administrators can also use a SureBackup job to create an isolated virtual environment that
starts the application from the VM, where any specific tasks can be performed in native tools such as SQL Server
Management Studio. From the virtual lab, the application is fully functional and allows you to search through and
restore the data elements you need. In particular, SQL Server administrators can user SQL Server Management
Studio to manipulate data as needed.

Veeam Explorer for SQL Server, however, will address most recovery situations especially if you are not an
experienced Database Administrator. The ability to restore one or more SQL databases to the time of the image-
based backup, to a specific time or to a specific transaction, is very beneficial to businesses today. The explorer
also can perform table-level and database object level restores. Table level restores can help meet the recovery
time objectives by allowing users to just restore the table and not necessarily the whole database. Database
object level recovery will allow users to easily restore individual stored procedures, functions, views and other
system objects back to the production database.

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This tool also permits a database to be exported through Veeam Explorer for SQL Server. The figure
below shows Veeam Explorer for SQL Server with the restore and export menu for a database: It is easy
to perform a SQL item restore. The Veeam Explorer for SQL Server restore wizard gives a number of
options to retrieve SQL data from the Veeam backup:

Restore a whole database from the image-based backup time

Restore a whole database to a specific point in time

Restore a whole database to a specific transaction

These specific restore options are shown in the figure below:

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Oracle Database
Oracle is mostly run in large enterprise environments to help enable businesses store and analyze data.
Oracle database are critical to the working environment with many users and processes depending
on the application to run their day to day operations. Similar to other critical applications, if an oracle
database goes down, the whole business could experience downtime or even worse, lose productivity
and money. Since Oracle databases are relational databases, you run the risk of spreading corrupted
data throughout the entire database if one entity gets infected. With Oracle storing numerous amounts
of data it is important to have a fall back plan in place, most importantly a backup solution that will
allow you to recover or rollback the database fast and efficiently to meet recovery time objectives.
Oracle does provide some recoverability tools to help when issues arise, but for all else there is always
Veeam Explorer for Oracle.

Veeam Explorer for Oracle allows users to browse the database hierarchy and restore them to the
original server or a different server. To be able to restore, you must first make an application consistent
backup and ensure that Oracle transaction log replay is selected. This is required if users want to recover
the database to a specific point in time or to a state before a transaction. This is done in the backup job
settings, under guest processing. Figure 6 shows this option being enabled.

Figure 6 shows that before the backup is taken the user will need to open the application-aware
processing option and edit the object. Then, the user will need to select process transaction logs with
this job as shown in Figure 6. This is a recommended setting to use with the Veeam Explorer for Oracle
that will provide those point in time restores.

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Item-level recovery from a Storage Snapshot

Storage snapshots are another technology that can be used to recover items from application
workloads. When a snapshot is taken, it creates a virtual copy of data on the storage at a particular time.

It is important to note that a snapshot is not equivalent to a backup and a regular backup process
should still be implemented in your environment. However, storage snapshots have little impact on
application workloads and minimal to zero impact on users. This allows snapshots to be used as points
in time to create a backup or to perform a restore. Storage snapshots provide businesses the ability to
backup large volumes of data quickly with little disruption than traditional backup methods. This makes
it optimal for administrators to utilize snapshots to get fast backups and restores.

Storage snapshots can perform restores for any critical application including Exchange, Active
Directory, SharePoint, Oracle and SQL Server. To utilize restore scenarios, you extract the database
from the storage snapshot. Since a storage snapshot can be taken frequently without disrupting
production VMs, it allows for low recovery time objectives (RTO) and less data loss. There are different
types of snapshot technologies, so before taking a snapshot, if you are not familiar with the different
technologies, read about them to understand how each is unique. If you are using HPE, NetApp, EMC
or Nimble storage devices, Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots leverages the native storage APIs,
allowing Veeam to leverage these snapshots as restore points. This Explorer supports multiple restore
scenarios including Guest OS Files, Full VMs, and application items. The figure below shows how easy it
is to restore application items from a storage snapshot:

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Restores for any situation

One of the most critical decision points for any IT pro is to take the right course of action when things
dont go as planned. Specifically, with Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 (part of Veeam Availability
Suite), there are more than 47 restore scenarios from one agentless backup.

Can item-level recovery be fast and easy?

It should, its Important!
The ability to recover an item from a tier-1 application is a necessary table stake today. Businesses have
high expectations and applications need to succeed, regardless of industry.

Maintaining the ability to easily perform recoveries of critical applications enables you to avoid data
loss and remain Always-On. When a database becomes corrupt or an application fails, sometimes a
full restore is necessary to correct the issue while other times it is not. It is important to ensure your
backup solution is VSS-aware and can detect if the VM is containing an application. This will allow your
backups to be application consistent. An Item-level restore can be beneficial and time saving when
only needing to recover individual items and can help you avoid data loss. When performing a full VM
recovery, you could lose data based on when your last restore point was taken. Item-level recovery
methods often allow you to insert the item directly into the database, export the item to a desktop,
or open the item. The Veeam Explorers give you all this functionality and are all included in Veeam
Backup & Replication. Even better, they are included in our FREE editions as well! So, if you havent had a
chance, check them out as they may be the perfect fit for your data center needs.

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About the Author

Kirsten Stoner is a Product Strategy Coordinator at Veeam Software. Her
responsibilities include community tasks such as providing answers to
Spiceworks users online, social media and content for Veeam campaigns.
You can follow Kirsten on Spiceworks at:
http://community.spiceworks.com/people/kirsten-veeam

About Veeam Software

Veeam recognizes the new challenges companies across the globe face in enabling the Always-
On Business, a business that must operate 24.7.365. To address this, Veeam has pioneered a
new market of Availability for the Always-On Enterprise by helping organizations meet recovery
time and point objectives (RTPO) of less than 15 minutes for all applications and data, through
a fundamentally new kind of solution that delivers high-speed recovery, data loss avoidance,
verified protection, leveraged data and complete visibility. Veeam Availability Suite, which
includes Veeam Backup & Replication, leverages virtualization, storage, and cloud technologies
that enable the modern data center to help organizations save time, mitigate risks, and
dramatically reduce capital and operational costs.

Founded in 2006, Veeam currently has 41,000 ProPartners and more than 205,000 customers
worldwide. Veeam's global headquarters are located in Baar, Switzerland, and the company has
offices throughout the world. To learn more, visit http://www.veeam.com.

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