Full vmdk vmware restore from incremental backup ?

[nick80]

Hi,

When attempting to restore the whole vm via the vmdk I found thast only the full backups were available to me.

I found a technote at the time that seemed to indicate this was normal but have since been question about this so I need to ensure this is absolutely correct.

I have checked the Netbackup VMWare administrators guide and found the follwoing which seems to indicate we should be able to restore a vmdk from and incremental backup :

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About incremental backups of virtual machines

NetBackup enables full virtual machine and file-level incrementals in the same backup (the Enable file recovery fromVMbackup option).

Better support for incremental backup is available when you use vStorage and BLIB (Enableblock-levelincrementalbackup). BLIB requires ESX 4.x and virtual machines at vmx-07 or later.

Note: Individual file recovery is supported from full backups and from incremental backups, as long as the Enable file recovery fromVMbackup policy option is enabled.

Note: In earlier releases of NetBackup for VMware, incremental backups had to be based on timestamps, not on archive bit. This requirement has been removed from NetBackup 7.5. For incremental backups, you do not have to configure the client on the VMware backup host for timestamps .

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My policy is setup with the following attributes :

Schedule Type - Differential Incremental,

Enable file recovery from VM backup - ticked,

Exclude deleted blocks - ticked,

Exclude swap and paging files - ticked,

Transport mode - Both ndb and san effected,

Primary VM identifier - VM display name,

Virtual machine quiesce - enabled,

Virtual disk selection - Include all disks

Is someone able to confirm whether or not we should be able to restore a full vm via a vmdk restore from a incremental backup? And if so it is something I need to change in terms of the attributes I have in place ?

Thanks

Nick

[Mark_Solutions · Accepted solution]

Incremental for the vmdk will work but you need to select Block Level Incremental Backup (BLIB) and for that to work the client needs to be the right version and also have Change Block Tracking enabled

If all of that is done you can run incremental backups for the vmdks

[ontherocks · Accepted solution]

While performing full VMware restore :-
When you browse for Virtual Machine backups, you will see recovery points for both full and incremental backups.
When you choose an incremental backup, NetBackup will take care of restoring full and incremental such that the VM is given back to you exactly the way it was when you ran the incremental backup.
There is no need to manually apply incremental backups after the restore from full backup.