Instant File Share Recovery Usecase

Maybe you heard already that Veeam has announced at VeeamON 2020 a new feature for their upcoming Release Veeam Availibility Suite v11 called “Instant File Share Recovery”. Since Version 10 Veeam is able to backup file shares in an efficient way to disk. You can recover a whole filesystem or only some files and folders. But today our file servers and NAS systems gets bigger and bigger and if you need to recover a whole share it would take a while to restore this data.

But here comes the new feature “Instant File Share Recovery” (IFSR) and helps us to provide users access to the backuped data. The users are able to browse in the share and to open/read files, but can’t write to this share. I was able to test this feature with an v11 Beta release, because I’m working as an Senior Systems Engineer for Veeam. And it worked very well in my test enviroment.

The instant recovered shares will be presented at a mount server.

With IFSR one or more shares from backup can be mounted and presented as shares on the Mount Server which is most likely the Repository Server. Ok, now our files are “back”, but how can I make this file shares available for my end users?

Here Microsoft DFS comes to the rescue and helps us with this. Many customers in the world are using Microsoft DFS to provide a unified access to corporate file share ressources and uses it as single entry. Maybe we can use this for redirect our user access?

This is my little DFS test environment

In my homelab I created a DFS root called \\homelab\dfs where I added on the first level to folders Field and Orga and on the second level the folders redirecting to shares on a NetApp Simulator. In this example you see that e.g. the folder “sales” is redirecting to a share. This reparse points redirects the user access to one or more “Folder Targets”. In my case I have only one “Folder Target” for each reparse point.

My scripting idea was this:

  1. Scan the DFS root for reparse points and folder targets
  2. Get all shares from a given backup job
  3. For each share in the backup job start a Instant File Share Recovery Session
  4. Disable the original folder target and add the file share from mount server
  5. After this script waits for a cleanup of running sessions and DFS

The script will be started with only a few parameters:

Involve-NASInstantDFSRecovery.ps1 -DfsRoot "\\homelab\dfs" -ScanDepth 3 -VBRJobName "DFS NAS Test" -Owner "HOMELAB\Administrator"
  • DfsRoot is the dfs root folder you want to scan for folder targets which maybe needs to changed
  • ScanDepth is the number of subfolder levels you want to scan for folder targets
  • VBRJobName is the name of the job where the shares are backuped
  • Owner is the Owner which should be set if no owner is set for files/folders

I have created a short demo video of this script in my lab environment, if you want to see everything in action:

I hope you like my idea and give my script a try, if you have access to the beta or maybe later in a production version of v11.

Please provide feedback by commenting this blog post or report errors, bugs or feature requests to my github repository.

You will find the script code in this github repository:
https://github.com/marcohorstmann/powershell/tree/master/BR-NASInstantDFSRecovery

You may also like...

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *