Instructions on finding backups in an offline managed vault

Introduction

You might face a situation when the Storage Node is offline and there is no possibility to attach a managed vault to a new Storage Node, however you need to immediately access the backup files stored in this vault in order to perform recovery.

Instructions below will guide you through the vault structure to the desired backup file.

(!) It is impossible to restore backups from managed vault with deduplication without using the Storage Node.

Solution

Contents of the vault location folder will suffice to identify a particular backup:

1. Navigate to the vault backup location folder -> and get inside the .meta folder there (e.g. F:\111\.meta\).
2. There will be GUID-named files (e.g. 65C1DB34-E515-4024-93D0-78BEE337C5EC) which contain information about this location and about existing machines and their backups. We need to search only through files which have the type set to "archive":
3. Based on the "machine_name" tag find the machine you need, e.g. in the below example the backed up machine is named ABR-SRV.ABR.com:

   <machine_name>
   ABR-SRV.ABR.com
   </machine_name>

   In addition, we need to make sure that the backup name is the one we need by checking the "name" tag, e.g. in the below example the backup is named "backup":

4. Once we are sure that we have found the proper XML file, we can dig down into the backups => go to the "computer" folder in the backup location (e.g. F:\111\computers\) => and browse down the folder consisting of two parts: machine_id and instance_id which you can find under the respective tags in the above XML file, e.g.:

   <instance_id>
   A026EC87-95AF-4CDA-9AE3-A0807AF5D530
   </instance_id>

   <machine_id>
   36209C24-D9E0-4C1D-8C4F-AFB1F2B4B647
   </machine_id>

   => and with the above values the path will be: F:\111\computers\36209C24-D9E0-4C1D-8C4F-AFB1F2B4B647.A026EC87-95AF-4CDA-9AE3-A0807AF5D530\

5. Browse down to the "users" folder -> and then down to the folder with the respective SID name which you can find under the "owner_sid" tag, e.g.:

   <owner_sid>
   S-1-5-21-318828549-760777030-2601414436-500
   </owner_sid>

   => F:\111\computers\36209C24-D9E0-4C1D-8C4F-AFB1F2B4B647.A026EC87-95AF-4CDA-9AE3-A0807AF5D530\users\S-1-5-21-318828549-760777030-2601414436-500\

6. Finally go down to the "archives" folder -> and then down to the folder with the respective archive GUID which you can find in "archive_id" tag, e.g.:

   <archive_id>
   65C1DB34-E515-4024-93D0-78BEE337C5EC
   </archive_id>

   => F:\111\computers\36209C24-D9E0-4C1D-8C4F-AFB1F2B4B647.A026EC87-95AF-4CDA-9AE3-A0807AF5D530\users\S-1-5-21-318828549-760777030-2601414436-500\archives\65C1DB34-E515-4024-93D0-78BEE337C5EC\

   

7. Inside there can be several folders (with names "1", "2", etc.) containing TIB files with the timestamp in their names, e.g.:

   __2010_09_15_10_05_22_078U.TIB

   Each folder has a set of backups containing one full backup and a chain of incrementals to this full backup. Using the timestamp you can easily determine the date to which you want to restore the machine.

More information

See also:

• Acronis Backup 11.7/11.5 and Acronis Backup & Recovery 11: Databases and Logs