Now that you have your backups running, you can restore your data when you need it. There are two ways to restore the data.
You can:
Restore your data back to Microsoft Entra ID
On the Microsoft Entra ID Overview page, click Restore Data.
On the Restore Data dialog that appears, select the data that you want to restore.
You can select the snapshot from the dropdown that shows the date-time.
Click Restore.
On the Restore Data dialog that appears, provide:
Restore Options: Druva performs an in-place restore. That is, it replaces an existing object with its backup. You can choose to:
Restore Relationships: Enable this setting to restore the relationship of an object, such as a user, with other objects. For example, you have a user who is assigned a device. That is a relationship between a user and a device. Similarly, an app deployed on a device is a relationship between the device and its app.
Restore permanently deleted items only: Enable this setting to ensure that Druva restores only the objects deleted from your Microsoft Entra ID tenant.
Settings Behavior: Specify whether Druva should overwrite or skip restoring the selected settings.
❗️Note: Settings are a part of the tenant as well as a Microsoft Entra ID entity. For example, the 'Users' entity has its own settings.
Set default password for permanently deleted users: Ensure that you provide a password that adheres to your company's password policy. Microsoft Entra ID can prompt the user to change the password on the first login. If the password that you specify does not meet your company's password policy, then Druva will fail creating the user in your Microsoft Entra ID tenant at the time of restore.
❗️Note: Druva asks you to provide a default password each time you restore your data. Druva asks this to ensure that in-case there's a user in the restore payload that needs a default password, Druva's platform can use it.
Click Restore.
Druva creates a restore job. To monitor the job’s progress, visit the jobs page.
💡Tip: You can also search for data that you want to restore. More details are covered under the searching for data at the time of restore section.
ℹ️ Info: You can also restore data at granular level. For example, you want to restore a specific user. Click Users to see all the users that Druva backed up. You can select the user and see that user’s data. For more information, see granular options to restore data.
A note about restores
When you run a restore, Druva looks for users in your Microsoft Entra ID tenant using the globally unique identifier (GUID). After using GUID, Druva uses the userPrinicpalName to look for users. It’s possible that Druva finds a backed up user using the userPrincipalName but not the GUID. This happens if a user was removed and then added as a new user to your Microsoft Entra ID tenant. In such a case, Druva treats the new user on Microsoft Entra ID and the backed up user on Druva as the same user.
Having said that, Druva looks for other objects such as devices and apps using their GUID only.
When Druva restores a deleted entity such as a user or a group, Microsoft assigns the entity a new GUID.
A note about restoring a user with a passwordProfile
Druva restores the data of a user with passwordProfile field as-is if it’s not null. However, if it’s null, Druva sets the passwordProfile field to:
"passwordProfile": {
"forceChangePasswordNextSignIn": true,
"password": "user-provided password"
}
Download the data to your device
If you don't want to run a restore and simply want to download some data, Druva provides an option to create a download job. Druva provides a link on the job's page once it completes the job. You can use the link to download the data that you asked for.
Perform the following steps to create a download job.
On the Microsoft Entra ID Overview page, click Restore Data.
On the Restore Data dialog that appears, select the data that you want to download.
You can select the snapshot from the dropdown that shows the date-time.
💡Tip: You can also search for data that you want to download. More details are covered under the searching for data at the time of restore section.
ℹ️ Info: You can also download data at granular level. For example, you want to download a specific user. Click Users to see all the users that Druva backed up. You can select the user and see that user’s data. For more information, see granular options to restore data.
Click Download.
On the Download dialog that appears, choose whether you want to include relationships in the JSON and click Download.
ℹ️ Info: When you click the Download button, it creates a download job. Go to the jobs page and choose the right download job using the job ID. The job provides a download link. Click on the link to download the zip file that contains your data in JSON format.
Searching for data at the time of restore
When you click the Restore Data button, you see the snapshot viewer dialog. The dialog also provides an option to search the data.
Click on this box to see a search prompt.
Specify the filters that you want to search. For example, if you want to search for a user, enter the user’s name (or principal name) in the search box, select the Object Type as Users, and click Search.
💡Tip: You can specify a time frame using the From and To fields of the Time Modified section. For example, if you want to search for data that was backed up between May 13th, 2024 and May 16th, 2024, you can specify these dates in the From and To fields respectively. Druva will then retrieve data from the snapshots taken between these dates.
Druva presents the list of users that match against the search query.
Now, you can select the items and then either restore them into Microsoft Entra ID or download them.
❗️Note: You cannot download the data or restore it if the selected items belong to different snapshots.
Search functionality only looks for changes in an entity's attributes.
💡Tip: The trash icon next to a record indicates that it was deleted in between snapshots. You can use the Show only deleted records to get a list of these records.
Granular restore options at the time of restore
If you look closely, you can click all the options under the Restore Data window.
If you click on any of the entities, you can either see all the objects under it or its data. For example, if you click Users, you can see all the users that Druva backed up.
Like the entities list, you can also click on a user.
❗️Note: If you are looking for licenses attached to a user, the Properties section shows it.
You get an overview of the user, an option to restore or download the user’s data, and an option to compare the user’s data with other snapshots.
On the Compare tab, you can select an older snapshot, and compare the data that changed between backups.
❗️Note: The compare section provides an option to choose older and newer snapshots. For example, Snapshot 2 can show snapshots from February as well as July if a May snapshot is selected under Snapshot 1. Having said that, Snapshot 2 only provides the snapshots that have some records that are different with respect to the snapshot selected under Snapshot 1.
The compare screen looks for data changes at all levels, including changes in relationships between entities and changes in an entity's attributes.
You can compare all the data or use the Show only the difference toggle switch to see the pieces of data that changed.
The options to restore or download a user’s data are available to you at each step. These options are available to all the entities that Druva protects. You can go into each entity, review the data that is available, and choose what you want to restore (or download).