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Prepare for recovery with Veeam Recovery Media

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Veeam Recovery Media can be used to recover an entire machine or individual partitions when the OS is down or missing.

In order for recovery to be possible, you must have a system image with the necessary drivers (Linux) or a boot disk (Windows) created prior to recovery.

Prepare for recovery on Linux⁠

  1. Download the image.
  2. Optional: add drivers to Veeam Recovery Media.

1. Download image⁠

Restrictions when using Veeam Agent and Veeam Recovery Media are described in the System Requirements and Before You Begin instructions of the Veeam documentation.

For more information about the contents of the standard image, see Drivers in Veeam Recovery Media in the Veeam documentation.

  1. Download a ready-made standard image:

    • on the Veeam website (not available in Russia, requires a free Veeam account) — to download, click Get Link → Additional Downloads;
    • from the Selectel vault.

  2. Burn the image. Do not use image burning programs — they may affect the contents and make recovery impossible:

    sudo dd bs=4M if=<path_if> of=<path_of> status=progress oflag=sync

    Specify:

    • <path_if> — image path veeam-recovery-amd64-5.0.0.0.iso;
    • <path_of> — path to which the image will be written.

2. Optional: add drivers to Veeam Recovery Media⁠

You may need to include additional machine-specific controller and network device drivers in the image.

  1. On the machine with the backup agent installed, launch the Veeam interface:

    veeamconfig ui

  2. Press m → Patch recovery media.

  3. If the machine is connected to the Internet, select Download and patch ISO.

  4. If the machine is not connected to the Internet, select Patch local ISO and specify the path to the downloaded image.

  5. If the machine to be restored uses UEFI, check the corresponding box.

  6. Select the location where the ready Veeam Recovery Media image will be saved.

  7. Click OK. The image creation process will take a few minutes.

Prepare for recovery on Windows⁠

During recovery, the pre-prepared Veeam Recovery Media boot disk is connected to the computer and booted from it.The preparatory steps may differ depending on the type of computer.

Veeam Recovery Media tools are available for virtual machine recovery:

  • Bare Metal Recovery — restore data from Veeam Agent backup for Windows;
  • Windows Recovery Environment — Restore a system image created by built-in Microsoft Windows tools;
  • Tools — tools for system management and diagnostics (command line, password reset, driver loading, memory diagnostics and boot recovery).

Prepare the boot disk⁠

  1. Create a bootable disk using the Create Recovery Media application that was installed with the backup agent — use the file
    C:\Program Files/Veeam/Endpoint Backup/Veeam.Endpoint.RecoveryMedia.exe.

    You can include network adapter and storage controller drivers from your current computer or add additional drivers to the boot image. For more information about creating a bootable disk, see Creating Veeam Recovery Media in the Veeam documentation.

  2. Save the boot disk to an external drive that will be available in case of recovery.