Veritas CloudPoint Administrator's Guide
- Getting started with CloudPoint
- Section I. Installing and configuring CloudPoint
- Preparing for installation
- Deploying CloudPoint
- Deploying CloudPoint in the AWS cloud
- Using plug-ins to discover assets
- Configuring off-host plug-ins
- AWS plug-in configuration notes
- Google Cloud Platform plug-in configuration notes
- Microsoft Azure plug-in configuration notes
- HPE RMC plug-in configuration notes
- NetApp plug-in configuration notes
- Hitachi plug-in configuration notes
- InfiniBox plug-in configuration notes
- About CloudPoint plug-ins and assets discovery
- Configuring the on-host agents and plug-ins
- Oracle plug-in configuration notes
- Protecting assets with CloudPoint's agentless feature
- Preparing for installation
- Section II. Configuring users
- Section III. Protecting and managing data
- User interface basics
- Indexing and classifying your assets
- Protecting your assets with policies
- Tag-based asset protection
- Replicating snapshots for added protection
- Managing your assets
- About snapshot restore
- Single file restore requirements and limitations
- Additional steps required after a SQL Server snapshot restore
- Monitoring activities with notifications and the job log
- Protection and disaster recovery
- Section IV. Maintaining CloudPoint
- CloudPoint logging
- Troubleshooting CloudPoint
- Working with your CloudPoint license
- Managing CloudPoint agents and plug-ins
- Upgrading CloudPoint
- Uninstalling CloudPoint
- Section V. Reference
About indexing and classifying snapshots
Taking a snapshot protects your asset data, but does not give you insight into the data itself. You know the time that you created the snapshot and the asset that was protected, but little else. Knowing the content of the snapshot can be crucial. A snapshot may contain personally identifiable information (PII) and other sensitive data. If a snapshot contains sensitive data, you might treat it differently, or even delete it.
The classification feature lets you analyze your snapshot content, flag sensitive data, and take further actions as necessary.
Indexing creates an index of the files in a snapshot. Having an index of the files enables you to restore a single file from a snapshot. Classification goes deeper into the data than indexing. During classification, indexing is performed automatically before the classification process identifies items that contain tags from the Veritas Information Classifier. Tags indicate the type of data that is in a file, such as a credit card number, but not the actual data. For any snapshot, you can choose to index without classifying or to index and classify.
After a snapshot has been classified, you can always reclassify it. Reclassifying is useful if you have changed the settings in the Veritas Information Classifier since the last classification of a snapshot. During reclassification, CloudPoint can reclassify the snapshot contents based on the newly enabled or disabled classification policies in VIC and then display all the tags that are assigned to the files.
Consider the following when you work with indexing and classification:
Classification and indexing are licensed features and are not available with the CloudPoint Freemium license. Install or upgrade to a CloudPoint Enterprise or an equivalent license to enable and use these features in your CloudPoint deployment.
Indexing and classification are supported on Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and in the same region and the same cloud account or project as the CloudPoint server. Each account or project will need its own CloudPoint configuration.
For indexing to be successful, the snapshot that is being indexed must be local to the CloudPoint host so that it can be restored on the CloudPoint host in order to mount and scan the file system contents.
Indexing fails if the snapshot that is being indexed is not in the same region, cloud account, availability zone, or project as where the CloudPoint host resides. The job fails irrespective of whether the operation is triggered manually from the CloudPoint UI or using CloudPoint REST APIs.
In such cases, the CloudPoint UI does not display any errors indicating the failure. The only way to find out the status of an indexing job is to look through the coordinator logs and check for error messages.
For indexing and classification operations to run successfully, the target instance must be running.
Indexing and classification are supported only for file system snapshots that you take at the disk level.
Indexing and classification operations are not performed on symbolic links (symlink or soft link) that are references to another file or directory in the form of an absolute or a relative path.
Only one classification or indexing job can run at a time. Additional snapshots are put in a queue until the previous classification or indexing job completes.
A snapshot that is in the process of being indexed cannot be classified. The indexing process must complete before classification can start.
You cannot delete a snapshot, either manually or using a policy, if indexing or classification is in progress, or if a granular restore operation (SFR) is being performed on the snapshot.
Similarly, if a snapshot is being deleted, no other simultaneous operations can be triggered on that snapshot.
Sometimes, a classification job might fail even if the indexing job on the asset has completed successfully. You might not see any snapshot granules in the CloudPoint UI.
In such cases, you may have to reinitiate the indexing and classification jobs on the same asset again.
Classification is supported for a maximum file size of 128 MB.
All Veritas Information Classifier (VIC) policies are disabled by default. Before you trigger a classification job from CloudPoint, ensure that at least one classification policy is enabled in VIC.
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