Production Data Export

Consider a situation where you want to extract a “point in time” data set from your production data for data analysis, migration or auditing? How can you easily accomplish this task? What options do you have to meet this requirement?

Sometimes your business requires a particular data set to be shared with others; perhaps you have to share for development, data analysis, data sharing with remote offices, compliance, auditing, and more.

To carry out your data extraction task, you must first carefully plan your steps before exporting the data set. This caution is to prevent accidentally exposing your entire production data to un-authorized personnel. Accidental data exposure is a familiar problem that we all want to avoid.

Now, what if I tell you that you can safely extract your “point in time” data set in a few easy steps with Veeam Backup and Replication using a new feature introduced in Update 4, called “Export Backup”. This new feature allows you to export the selected restore point of a particular object in the backup job. It can be as a standalone full backup file (VBK), and to keep it as separate retention, or can be kept indefinitely. To read more about this aspect of the features, follow this link https://www.veeam.com/veeam_backup_9_5_whats_new_wn.pdf – page 8).

Scenario

Let’s consider the following scenario; as a backup admin, your manager has asked you to extract all the data from a restore point beginning at three weeks ago. The data extraction he needs must include all the incremental data up to the most recent, and then you are to share it with a data mining company who will use it to make a report about the business performance.

Solution

As a backup admin who is using Veeam Backup and Replication software to backup the production infrastructure, you can easily accomplish this request by following these steps:

From the Veeam Backup and Replication Console, select Home -> Backup, then select Export Backup.

At the Export Backup interface, choose the desired backup point by pressing on the Add icon, then select the Restore Point, and then select Add.

By pressing on Point option, you can check the Restore Points with all the Restore Point Dependencies:

Also on the same wizard, you can specify the retention time of the export file before it is deleted. You can choose from one, two, or three months. There are also options for one, two, three, and five years.

When you have made your selections to set up your data point export, press Finish. A Full backup file will be created and available in the same repository as the source files.

Note: This newly created export file contains the full and the two incremental files.

File Location and Copy

After the export has been set up and runs successfully, the.VBK file will be available in the same repository as that of the source files. These can be located from the Veeam Console. The file will be attached under Backups -> Disk(imported) option.

To copy the file from the repository, you can copy manually, or use Veeam Copy Job -> File option:

Conclusion

On this blog post, I have shown how you can benefit from the new Export Backup function. As you noted, with these easy steps, you can encapsulate restore points together under a single file. The single file can then be easily shared or shipped to other systems or operators for many business reasons. The single file can also be used as an offsite archive file, used in system migration if that is a requirement.

I hope this blog post helps you to use this new feature and find other beneficial business use cases for your business. Thank you, and please don’t hesitate to share this blog and share your feedback with the readers.