Did you ever experience a problem with a non-bootable virtual machine, where you didn’t really care so much for the entire VM, but you desperately needed to access some critical files? I guess everyone has had this case in their career. This special request is possible to achieve by using the File Granular Restore feature natively supported by Altaro Software. It allows you to access the content of the virtual machine of a VM backup. This is quite convenient because you don’t need to restore the entire VM, you only restore the files you need.
Note: File Granular Restore from Linux/Unix VMs is not yet supported.
But, in the first place, it is mandatory that you already have a backup of the broken virtual machine/s. I did cover both hypervisors and explained how to perform a backup of virtual machines on Hyper-V and VMware ESXi using Altaro Software.
HOW TO DO IT?
The Altaro VM Backup UI is user-friendly, and all options are structured in understandable and logical order. This is something I really much appreciate about Altaro VM Backup. In my case, I do restore Hyper-V VM, but the procedure is equally applicable to VMware ESXi.
- Connect to your Altaro VM Backup server.
- Click on Restore > File Granular Restore.
- Choose the backup location where your VM is stored and click Next. This shows all configured backup locations. In my case, it is Synology NAS.
4. Choose a virtual machine to restore from and click Next. You will see all VMs that are backed up. In my case, there are only two VMs, Active Directory, and Win-Srv-2022.
5. Choose a backup version to restore for and click Next.
6. Select the virtual disk and partition and choose what files you want to restore, and then click Next.
7. Choose where you want to extract data, to the local directory or network location, and then click Extract.
8. Open Explorer and navigate to extracted data.
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