Are my Veeam backups really Immutable & Object Locked?

This was a question recently asked by a client who were looking to use our Object Storage Platform as a capacity tier for their Veeam SOBR. So, we didn’t just say "yes they are" and leave it at that, we went ahead and proved it! “Proof is in the pudding” you might say.

Test # 1 - Veeam Immutability

Delete VM backup from Veeam B&R that has Immutability enabled. This demonstrates immutability in a scenario where accidental deletion or malicious intent is carried out.

From the Veeam console, we navigate to Object Storage under backups, which will list all the VM’s being backed up. We tried deleting the backup and received an error message - Failed to delete backup Error: Unable to delete backup in the Capacity Tier because it is immutable until 26 Feb 2022.

Test # 2 - Object Lock

Delete VM files from the Object bucket that has Object Lock enabled. (NOTE - Object Lock needs to be enabled at bucket creation)

A recursive delete was done via the S3 CLI and Veeam could still see all the restore points. This demonstrates that if the Object platform was compromised, we will still have the ability to recover from it if necessary.

We took it a step further and imported the backups into a completely different Veeam B&R environment - Restore points all in tack.  

From the new B&R environment we could initiate an Instant Restore. The workload is recoverable.

So, we managed to prove that yes, your backups are Immutable and Object Locked and we could recover workloads if necessary.

The technology works folks!