Unable to perform file restore on bitlocker encrypted VM's

[arun0700]

Hello everyone,

I have a few windows VMware virtual machines which have bitlocker enabled for all drives. These machines are backed up using "VMWare" policy type. When i try to perform a file level restore, it does not seem to work. All these servers are Windows 2019 and 2022 servers. The drives are encrypted and unlocked. The "Enable file recovery from VM backup" option is enabled in the backup policy. I get a message saying "There are no files matching teh specified criteria".

I see that netbackup is meant to support bitlocker from the article here: https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/article.100013303

Did anyone have this issue?

[davidmoline]

HI @arun0700 

Bitlocker shouldn't make a difference for the restore as that should be transparent to NetBackup. I assume that you have a NetBackup client installed in the VM you are testing - as the client is required to perform a single file restore (in general - there are methods to recover without the client installed which are described in the VMware guide). 

Given the error you describe, I suspect you may be choosing the wrong backup type in the restore GUI. The type needs to be selected a VMware (and not Windows). Try that, then make sure that the date range you search covers the backup. 

Cheers
David

[quebek · Accepted solution]

hey

I am thinking out loud...

From the TN you did provice, I can see this:

Solution

For file system backups, NetBackup does support the use of Microsoft BitLocker.

Which means the MS-Windows based backup should have been able to restore a single file, for VMWARE based ones I think not.

Maybe you can do instant access/recovery of this VM? once booted you can login pull out needed file?

VMWARE based backup is image based level backup and as such NBU cant see the files as these are encrypted with bitlocker

[Hamza_H]

Actually the technote is not clear enough.. we already had this case before and the SME himself that the technote is not clear to confirm whether it is supported or not..

Anyway, for the main question in this topic, I think as @davidmoline mentioned it is stuck at first step (browse of backups) so you needs to put the right type of the policy and the right name of the VM.

and of course if the VM doesn't have nbu client, you should use WebUI to perform agentless restore but there are few prerequisties that are needed (built-in administrator account) + .sja files added to the master using nbrepo -a command/ please read guides regarding this.

[davidmoline]

Hi @arun0700 

On reflection especially after the comments from @quebek I agree - the VMware backup can capture the VMDK files, but will be unable to process the image for granular recovery. 

The technote mentioned relates to using a NetBackup agent on the (whether physical or virtual is irrelevant) and the files should be captured without issue. The backup though would then need to be MS-Windows. 

If granular recovery is critical (as well as machine recovery) you could setup two policies - one to capture the machine state using VMware policy type and a second to capture the file system/drives you require using MS-Windows policy type. The later policy could just target the area you need to be able to recover files, and the VMware policy could potentially be setup to just capture the OS drives (in the advanced VMware configuration settings).

Thanks
David

[arun0700]

Hi @quebek,

I did test this and I can confirm that VMware policy type based backup does not support file level recovery with Bitlocker on. File backups with Bitlocker on works though and lets us restore files and folders.

@davidmoline I did choose VMware policy type while trying to perform file level restore with Bitlocker on and it failed.

Thanks everyone for your valuable feedbacks!