Everything that was backed up by our software needs to be restored by it, so if all of your machines are in one network environment I can suggest to maybe restore VM on a server machine and transfer the VHDX file to your desktop PC. — Matt

Lots of small environments only have one physical server. And even in environments that have 2 or 3; if they are all production servers, I don't necessarily want to touch them. Especially in a virus or ransomware scenario. If I have an option not to run the restore there I want to know about it.

Anyway, it appears that if I just want to be able to just pull an arbitrary VM out of the backups; I need a spare server with hyperV role with cloudberry vm edition installed; and the backup user account information for server it was hosted on.

I can cope with these limitations / restrictions; but its good to know about them in advance.

Hi Matt,

Thanks for your reply.

1) This works fine, all you need is a machine with the backup software installed on it. After that just log in under the same user and choose the backup prefix to see your data. — Matt

The machine i want to restore to is already setup with a different user with their own backup plans scheduled.

Changing to a different user, and running a one-off restore, sounds like it should work. And this should even be pretty easy to do via the RMM, which is good.

But will signing in with a different user disrupt what is already going on? If I simply change back to the original user after the restore is done, will the scheduled backups for that user and system just resume where things left off?

2) VM edition can't be installed on a desktop machine, but you can install the software on any other server machine and create a restore plan there. — Matt

Yes, I actually just noticed that in testing myself. Is there no way to simply retrieve the VM definition/disk image to a desktop? Lots of sites only have one server. Even if i could pull just the VHDX file out that would be terrifically useful.

3) This is achievable, but very time-consuming, since it involves logging in under several users and restore procedures can take a lot of time, depending on your network speeds. — Matt

Agreed.

Hi Matt & Anton,

So there is no straightforward / direct support for an mbs dashboard administrator for example to simply retrieve something from a backup, without first:

• deploying a computer
• installing the same (or higher) managed version of the client
• and registering it to that user's account

That's surprisingly awkward!

Is that deliberate?

It seems like it would be a common use case:

Suppose ServerA for User-ITAdmin dies; and I need to pull the latest backup of key accounting files immediately to DesktopB for User-Accountant so they can access and work with them in single user mode, while a replacement server is provisioned and fully restored.

Or suppose a HyperV Server running VM1 to VM4 dies; and I want to first restore the VM2 definition and disk image to a desktop; so I can host it from Win10 HyperV temporarily while we provision a replacement server, and bring everything back up.

Another scenario i was looking at trying:

One of the things I was considering trying to do was to setup a system that could be turned on, run a series of restore plans to restored key critical data from several different systems, operating under different user accounts, and then turn it off again; to create a secure offsite offline backup of that data.

This is all simply not really possible or supported, right?

Hi Anton,

I tried downloading and installing the standalone, in restore only mode.
I added an S3 account, it connected fine, and I was able to select my buckets.

However, when I try to create a restore plan, it doesn't appear to see anything in the bucket.

When i view the bucket in cloudberry explorer for S3, it sees the folders MBS-<id>, with the systems inside them.

Is the standalone restorer CAPABLE of restoring data backed up with the managed product?
If it is, how do i get it to see the data?

-regards,
Dave

That's good to know, thank you.

That's good to know. Thanks.

Just to clarify; Scenario 1 should work without VM edition right?

It makes sense that scenario 2 (and 3) would require VM edition on both systems.
The requirement that they be on the same user account poses a problem for me though.

Scenario 3 requiring the backup agent poses another problem, as I am trying to run the backup agent with restricted settings for security, and the system doesn't appear to really support having SOME systems using one agent, and other systems using another less restricted agent.*

* You can kind of hack it using sandbox builds but its super clumsy and difficult to manage. It was designed to manage releasing version updates, not managing different agent settings builds of a particular version for different groups.

Hi
Thanks; that all makes perfect sense.

David, ws.mspbackups.com is the DNS name of the cloudberry API that your backup software uses.

You will see the GUI console, for example, report that it can't resolve ws.mspbackups.com if you disconnect your system from the network and then try to launch the GUI.

I would expect that "ws" stands for "web service".


You probably have internet connectivity issues, or at least DNS service issues on the affected system(s). That address definitely should be resolvable.