Veeam NAS Backup - File Restore Options

We are going to look at restore options available for files backed up using NAS backup job. Once you have successfully completed a file share backup, you get the following restore options:

• restore entire file share 
• rollback to a point in time - it is actually a fast entire file share restore 
• files and folders - allows to pick individual files and folders

Let's take a look at each of them.

Restore file share 

Once started, the restore wizard will ask to select a specific restore point 

The location of the restore can be the original server or to another server

You will choose how to process the restore when the files already exist in destination: keep existing files, replace older file, replace newer files, overwrite. In the same tab you can select to keep the security attributes and permissions of the restored files.

Press Finish on Summary page and wait for the restore process to finish. In my case 51 files have been restored out of  750 on the share:

Rollback to a point in time
In case you don't want to go through the whole process from above, select the second restore option, select the point in time and the file share will be reverted to it:

Files and folders
This options let's you restore specific files or folder. It opens a searchable file explorer. Three different views are present in the file explorer:

• latest - presents a list with the latest versions of the files 

• all time - displays all versions of the file on the share 

• selected - presents the version of a file existing in specific restore point 

Looking at the different views from above you will notice that not only file size is different, but also the number of objects displayed in each view. This is based on the actual state of the file share when the backup was taken. 

After the file has been selected, the restore the file to the same location or copy it locally. 

In case you do not overwrite the original file, you will see the files in the share