Recovering Nasuni From a Complete Disaster

Disaster Recovery with the Nasuni Filer

So, what does it take to recover a destroyed Filer?

Five simple steps and less than 15 minutes. That’s it. That’s how long it takes to recover a Nasuni Filer regardless of the amount of data stored in it.

Let’s walk through the steps required to recover a specific file.

1. Download a copy of the Filer. The file is < 200MB so, depending on your download bandwidth, this should take about five minutes. Regardless of which version of the Filer you used to write the data originally, you’ll just download the latest version to restore.

2. Uncompress the image. This takes less than one minute. 

3. Launch VMware and open the Nasuni Filer .VMX file (we used VMware workstation), then perform initial installation answering basic network questions. No more than two minutes.

4. Browse to setup wizard and perform recovery process. This takes less than five minutes.

First, login with the same Nasuni.com account:

Next the Filer will ask if you’re trying to recover a lost Filer:

Now you'll need to confirm the Disaster Recovery process. 

You'll be asked if you escrowed your encryption key with Nasuni or held on to them locally - we kept ours local.

Locate the local encyption key and upload it to the Filer. 

The Filer asks if you are ready to perform the DR process. 

Accept the End User Licence Agreement. 

You're now asked to create an administrative user for the Filer. 

Configuration is now complete, the Filer will reboot. 

5. Now that the Filer is up and running, all that’s left to do is mount it in Windows and begin recovering your files.

a. Mount the Filer:

b. Browse through the Filer (there are no noticeable delays as you browse and access these files). In this demonstration, we are attempting to recover a PowerPoint presentation:

c. The presentation was recovered immediately:

Note that we assumed you have VMware installed already. If not, VMware installation is a simple process. If we wanted to make this whole process go faster we’d keep a copy of the Nasuni Filer install package around locally. The download was the longest step in the entire process.

If you have feedback or questions about this guide, please email us – feedback@nasuni.com

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