The 3-2-1 backup strategy is a best practice that suggests having three total copies of your data, two of which are local but on different devices or media, and one copy offsite. In the described scenario, although there is an offsite component (SOBR with AWS S3 Performance Tier), and a local hardened immutable repository, there is no indication of a second local copy on a different device or media. This means that there is only one local copy of the backup data and one offsite copy. Therefore, the setup does not meet the 3-2-1 best practices requirement, which would involve having at least one more local copy on different media or device.

To ensure that a backup job includes both the virtual machine's disk files and the Microsoft SQL database transaction logs, Application-aware processing should be used. This feature enables Veeam Backup & Replication to create transactionally consistent backups of VMs running VSS- aware applications like Microsoft SQL Server, ensuring that both the VM disks and the SQL transaction logs are properly backed up.

In the event that the Veeam Backup & Replication configuration database is corrupted, the appropriate action to take is to perform a configuration restore. Veeam Backup & Replication allows you to back up and restore its configuration database. The Restore option should be used to recover the data from a configuration backup. This process will restore the configuration database from the backup file, which includes information about backup jobs, repository settings, and more. Instant Recovery, Failover, and Migrate are not appropriate options for recovering a corrupted configuration database. Instant Recovery is used to quickly restore a VM to a running state, Failover is used for High Availability in case a VM fails, and Migrate is used to move VMs from one host or storage to another.

The Veeam restore process that allows for custom scripting to be run before returning a server to production is Staged Restore. This feature enables administrators to perform necessary operations, like running a script to remove customer photos, during the restore process before the VM is brought back online.