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Int

Member

Registered: 2017-12-05

Posts: 58

restoring many VMs with --restore-vms is a pain

Hello,

when you have to restore many VMs with --restore-vms (in my case 40) the usage method is really a pain in the b**t.
You have to select each VM manually, confirm the restore, enter the destination directory manually.
Doing this fourty times and having to wait for each restore in between is a real strain.

I tried to script it by specifying each individual backup path, but even then you have to select the VM, confirm and you cannot give a destination directory as parameter.

The XSIbackup advertisement "It's totally scriptable" does not apply here and that unfortunately makes using XSItools or other backup methods that require --restore-vms unusable for disaster recovery from my point of view.

Luckily I had a set of backups taken with XSIbackup-Free using vmkfstools before I upgraded the installation to XSIbackup-Pro and used XSItools. So I could restore them with a simple copy command overnight. Otherwise I would have sat there entering commands the whole night.

Please make --restore-vms scriptable!

Best regards

admin

Administrator

Registered: 2017-04-21

Posts: 2,072

Re: restoring many VMs with --restore-vms is a pain

The restore module is a script itself, so it's indeed totally scriptable. We'll nevertheless will take this into account and supress the confirmation when used from a script. Nevertheless this is a controverted feature, so we'll add some type of command to remove the prompt for confirmation.

This is only a problem when some circumstances concur: having the need to restore a big number of VMs and using [b](c)XSITools[/b]. When you have some sort of regular backup, restoring is quite easy, as you have an Rsync binary inside the /bin folder.

You didn't say what type of backup you were restoring in any case.

Int

Member

Registered: 2017-12-05

Posts: 58

Re: restoring many VMs with --restore-vms is a pain

I was restoring backups made with xsibackup-pro 11.2.3 using xsitools method.

You would also need to add an option to specify the destination path to make the restore module scriptable.

Int

Member

Registered: 2017-12-05

Posts: 58

Re: restoring many VMs with --restore-vms is a pain

[quote=admin]This is only a problem when some circumstances concur: having the need to restore a big number of VMs and using [b](c)XSITools[/b].[/quote]

Well, these circumstances you mention here are exactly the problematic circumstances I described in my initial post and the reason I posted this.
And isn't that the reason to use xsibackup anyway? To be able to restore a big number of VMs in case of a desaster?

[quote=admin]When you have some sort of regular backup, restoring is quite easy, as you have an Rsync binary inside the /bin folder.[/quote]

Could you explain this comment please?
Is using xsibackup with [b](c)XSITools[/b] not considered to be a regular backup?

admin

Administrator

Registered: 2017-04-21

Posts: 2,072

Re: restoring many VMs with --restore-vms is a pain

(c)XSITools is a deduplication engine:
[url=https://33hops.com/xsitools-vmfs-deduplication.html](c)XSIBackup Classic: deduplicate on top of VMFS[/url]

No, it's not a regular backup.