Restore individual file from VM backup

[Blue407]

Morning All

I am currently running a 30-day evaluation of this product.
I have successfully backed up a running Hyper-V VM (One of our File Servers running Server 2012 R2) to disk (Its 1.3TB) and then replicated it to tape.
I now want to do a restore of an individual file from the backup (as part of my testing).
Do you have to restore the whole VM onto disk, just to be able to restore an individual file?

I have managed to bring the whole backup back from tape onto disk, so have proven that bit works, but ideally I want to be able to extract an individual file form the tape VM without bringing back 1.3TB of data.
As this server grows its going to take hours and hours to bring back a full backup just for 1 file.

Thanks in advance for assistance

[PTide]

Hi and welcome to the community!

Do you have to restore the whole VM onto disk, just to be able to restore an individual file?

No, you have to restore the backup file to repository from tape and after that you can restore guest OS files from that backup, there is no need to restore the VM.

In most cases tapes are used for a long term archiving and are not very convenient for file-level restores, indeed. If you want to have another copy of your main backup and want it to be easily accessible please consider using backup copy job.

Thank you.

[Blue407]

Thanks for the very prompt response.

This become a more significant issue with large VM backups, possibly taking many hours to restore form tape to disk so an individual file can be accessed/restored. This is also an issue due to having sufficient disk space to restore the VM backup.

Any advice on how to better achieve this result?

[PTide]

To restore files faster you have to have the backup on some other media than tape. If you are still not sure where it'd be better to place backups please check this "Tape or Disk backup" thread.

Thank you.

[L33T]

Hi,

Can i ask, if we have some month end backups, have rebuilt the backup server (as V8 upgrade caused all sorts of headaches) and need to restore those do we have to restore the whole backup file before we can then restore the individual files? Does V9 have any other better ways of performing this? As our backup files can be up to 5TB it can take up to 9hrs just to get the backup file itself!

regards,
L33T

[Vitaliy S.]

Where do you store these archival backup files?

[barrnunn]

If you are backing up multiple VMs in a single backup, it can become quite large and make backup/restore from tape quite lengthy. If you can identify specific servers that you would likely need to restore from often, you may want to split them off into individual backup jobs and leave a few days worth online and use Copy to tape to store them for long term.