AVVI Restore of Differential Backup Restores ONLY Differential Data
Hello,
I use BE2010 R3 in a Win 2k8 VMware 4.0 VM to back up similar VMs using the AVVI through the VCenter. Backup policies perform weekly full and daily differential backups of all VMs, one job for each VM.
This is a new issue since installing BE2010 R3 SP4 and HF 212812.
On a test suite, when I try to restore a VM to its original location from a Differential backup (with "Delete existing..."), I get the warning stating that the full VM will be restored (as expected), the job runs and reports "Successful", however the restore of the 50+ GB VM runs in about 8 minutes and reports a byte cound roughly equal to the size of the Differential backup job (1.5GB or so). The job history reports that all three virtual disks were restored, but the VM fails to start with "operating system not found".
Re-trying the job, this time the byte count is less than 100 kB and the history reports only ONE vmdk was restored - still "Successful", though. Icing on the cake is, when I try to restore the VM from the Full backup that is the parent to the Differential I get the same result - "Successful" restore, 42,614 bytes Byte Count, and only one vmdk
Restoring the VM from an earlier or later Full backup works - so it seems that the Differential is poisoning the parent Full backup at some point.
I installed Hotfix 212812 because one of my servers was producing the error described in http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH201706. I preferred the error!!
Has anyone else seen this, who can maybe tell me what is going on?
The problem I saw with HF 212812 (https://support.symantec.com/en_US/article.TECH212812.html) is that
1. Restore of VM from the Differential backup restores only the Differential data, but restore still reports "successful".
2. After this has been tried once, a second attempt still reports successful but even LESS data is restored - apparently only one "shell" vmdk for me.
3. WORST OF ALL, running a restore of the Diff seems to "poison" the WF: once you have tried to restore from the Differential, its parent Weekly Full backup also becomes unusable for full VM restore, restoring "shell" data as in (2) above.
Normal file/folder restores from the Diffs still work.
The "Resolved issue" that I installed HF 212812 for was: "Backup Exec 2010 R3: AVVI restore from an incremental backup set of a virtual machine fails with error - Failed to mount one or more virtual disk images (TECH201706)". The failure was better.
My testing is done. I believe this hotfix is defective, and we will not deploy it.