Basics – PPDM 19.3 File Level Search from Image-Based Backups

I’ve been really looking forward to this demo video. When PPDM 19.3 was being worked on, I sat in a presentation about the upcoming features where the search capability was described.

I’m not talking interface search – that’s cool stuff, but this is the ability to search for files from VMware image-based backups. So what, you might say – file search from image-based backups has been around for a while.

Well, it has been, but not like this. I was actually a little disbelieving when it was first explained. You see, in order to achieve file search from image-based backups, other backup products will usually do something like:

• Mount the image after the backup to do a directory listing, or
• Have an agent running within the virtual machine to scan the directory listing during the backup.

PPDM, of course, does it better. It builds up a searchable index for the virtual machine as it’s being backed up – without any agents running. In fact, in some testing, I’ve enabled search against virtual machines that are powered off, and I still get full indexing available as soon as the backup is complete.

I was excited about the search engine and indexing process just from the description I got. Then I deployed it and ran my first search – this is damn fine tech. So here’s a video showing the entire end-to-end process:

I’m really impressed by this functionality, and I’m certain you will be too once you see it in operation.