To win the war against ransomware, you must protect not only your IT infrastructure but also your backup files themselves. If hackers get in and encrypt all your data including your backup files, you're ready to capitulate. So what's your ultimate backup files protection? It's called Immutability and it means “impossibility to delete”. In this article we will explore Veeam Immutable Backups.
To prohibit data deletion, Veeam Backup & Replication makes it immutable possible by either using secured Linux repos or applying the Object Lock technology provided by Amazon and some S3-Compatible providers. Immutability is a solution that protects your backups from deletion. The upcoming Veeam Backup and Replication v12 will enable this immutability to be configured pretty much everywhere even on-prem object storage, which will be supported on v12.
But no matter if you are storing your backup files on-prem, in your remote office, or the cloud. You should protect them by making them immutable. You have an advantage over hackers and inside men's as you can configure this functionality and secure your backup files before hackers can delete them.
So far there is no possibility to have immutable backups on Windows. Only Linux or Object storage. We have detailed the setup on Linux (note: there is a GitHub called VeeamHub Repo which is a Python script to quickly set up an immutable repository and we have documented it here.)
Use Chattr Command on Linux and protect your backups:
Note: Your Linux distro has to support chattr command otherwise it won't work.
The chattr’ can be used to preserve some system files that are very important and needs to remain in the host PC no matter what. Also to make a directory undeletable or unmodifiable for users other than superuser, is necessary.
Making directories secured: The flag +i’ can be used for a directory(as shown below) to make the directory immutable. Also, the flag -R’ is used here, which makes the call recursive and all the subfiles and directories are made
What are your options for Immutable Backups?
- Linux distro only (Not available in Windows yet).
- Physical server only – The hardened repository cannot be run in a VM on a VMDK (except in a home lab) as VMware would open another attack vector and adds another layer of complexity. A physical server is the only choice here.
Veeam supported Linux Distros for hardened Linux distros:
- Debian
- Centos
- RHEL
- Ubuntu
- SLES
- Oracle Linux
Veeam's requirements for setting up an Immutable backups
- Veeam Backup & Replication v11 or higher/newer
- Veeam backup types used must be forward incremental with periodic synthetic or active full.
- Veeam backup copy jobs must have GFS points configured.
How do I start?
In case you're not using Linux server for storing backups, it's high time to do so. It's the most effective way of being protected as you only have to purchase the hardware and install a Linux distro on it, then follow short config that we have have detailed here:
- Quickly setup a Veeam immutable repository via this GitHub Script
- Hardened backup repository on Linux distro – Veeam setup (v11)
- Veeam Backup and Replication 12 (BETA) – adding Hardened Linux Repository
Few Guidelines:
Repository Server Placement – The Veeam Backup Repository can be located wherever the environment allows it. The most common design has a primary backup on-site and a backup copy off-site.
3-2-1 Rule – 3 copies of the data (Production, Backup & Backup-Copy), 2 different media, 1 copy off-site.
Minimum CPU and RAM – The recommended minimum for a repository is 2 cores and 8 GB RAM.
YOu can find other best practices of designing Veeam Backup repository design here.
XFS file system format – Your data volume on your Linux server should be formatted as XFS. It is a preffered format over if you want to benefit from fast cloning functionality.
Quote
XFS Data Block Sharing (Reflink) provides the same benefits as ReFS in terms of speed and space consumption. Veeam leverages it to implement the Fast Clone functionality. Since all transformation tasks are done via metadata operations, synthetic full backups get a huge performance boost and they don’t take up any additional capacity.
The Linux implementation of XFS is limited to a maximum of 4K for the block size; this shouldn’t be an issue as the filesystem size can go up to 1PB and performance is not affected by the small block size. It also does not have any impact on Veeam’s RAID stripe size recommendation, because the filesystem block size is just how granularly the filesystem tracks block allocation.
Use Encryption to protect your backups
Encryption for Existing Jobs – If you enable encryption for an existing job, during the next job session Veeam Backup & Replication will create a full backup file. The created full backup file and subsequent incremental backup files in the backup chain will be encrypted with the specified password. Encryption is not retroactive. If you enable encryption for an existing job, Veeam Backup & Replication does not encrypt the previous backup chain created with this job. If you want to start a new chain so that the unencrypted previous chain can be separated from the encrypted new chain, follow this scenario: https://www.veeam.com/kb1885.
If you change the password for the already encrypted job, during the next job session Veeam Backup & Replication will create a new incremental backup file. The created backup file and subsequent backup files in the backup chain will be encrypted with the new password.
Note: To unlock a backup encrypted with several passwords, you must decrypt it in the following manner:
- If you import a metadata file (VBM), provide the latest password that was used to encrypt files in the backup chain.
- If you import a full backup file (VBK), provide the whole set of passwords that were used to encrypt files in the backup chain.
More about Veeam v12
- Veeam Backup and Replication 12 (Beta2) Installation
- Quickly setup a Veeam immutable repository via this GitHub Script
- Veeam v12 Announced
- VeeamON 2022 – (recordings are online…….v12, Ransomware, Kubernetes, Cloud-native Backups, Salesforce and Microsoft 365)
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