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In this post, I’m going to show you how you can restore one or a few files from an Azure virtual machine backup without restoring the entire virtual machine, thanks to Azure Backup Instant File Recovery, currently in preview.
In the past, if you wanted to restore an individual file from an Azure virtual machine backup, things got very complicated. You could restore the entire virtual machine, but that’s a slow process, especially if you want to get just one or a few files back from the past. And what if you don’t know when the file was last there or last in a healthy state? You might end up having to do a lot of restores just to find when the file was last available and reliable.
The clues for Instant File Recovery have been in the Azure Portal for a while, but the feature recently arrived for virtual machines. We now have the ability to mount a recovery point, from our on-premises PC, to restore a file from an Azure virtual machine with application consistency. We can browse the file structure as it was when the recovery point was created, find a file or folder, and copy/paste it to wherever we need it.
Note: Veeam FastSCP might prove to be a handy tool to copy the file back to the desired virtual machine in Azure from your on-premises PC.
You can use the new ability to restore individual or sets of files or folders in the Azure Recovery Services vault, even if you started backing up Azure virtual machines before the Instant File Recovery feature was released in February 2017.
Start your recovery by browsing to Backup in the settings of the Azure virtual machine. Click File Recovery (Preview) to start the restoration of a file(s)/folder(s) from the virtual machine.
The backup settings of an Azure virtual machine [Image Credit: Aidan Finn]
Choosing an Azure virtual machine recovery point to restore files from [Image Credit: Aidan Finn]
The Azure Backup recovery point mounted from my Azure virtual machine [Image Credit: Aidan Finn]
You can open File Explorer; each of the volumes from the backed up virtual machine are mounted as volumes. In the below screenshot, we can see that the OS volume (C:) is mounted as H: and the data disk (F:) is mounted as G:.
The mounted volumes from the Azure Backup recovery point [Image Credit: Aidan Finn]
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