Granular Restore

eazyBackup supports granular restore to recover individual files and folders from within a virtual disk image.

The granular restore feature is available as part of eazyBackup at no additional cost.

Compared to an ordinary File and Folder backup, the extra work involved to perform granular extraction of individual files from within a virtual disk image results in a small performance penalty. If you expect to restore individual files regularly, a File and Folder-type Protected Item may offer better performance. We recommend using the latest version of eazyBackup for best performance and compatibility.

The available granular restore capabilities do not depend on the backup device's operating system. For example, restoring files from an NTFS image is possible on a macOS device, and restoring files from an EXT4 image is possible on a Windows device.

For the following Protected Item types, Granular restore is available as an option during the Restore wizard process:

Protected Item type	Supported	Notes
Disk Image	Yes
Hyper-V	Yes	vhdx files only, not vhd nor any avhdx differencing disk
VMware vSphere	Yes

The granular restore feature requires that the virtual disk uses a compatible partitioning scheme:

Disk partition structure	Supported	Notes
GPT	Yes
MBR	Yes	Including EBR partitions
Windows Dynamic Disk	Partial	See note 1
Windows Storage Spaces	Partial	See note 1
Linux LVM2	Partial	See note 1
Linux MD	Partial	See note 1

Note 1: The underlying physical format is not supported for granular restore. However in a Disk Image backup, you may have the option to back up either the underlying physical format or the resulting virtual volume. If you back up the resulting volume, it may be supported for granular restore.

The granular restore feature requires that the partition uses a compatible filesystem type:

Filesystem	Supported	Notes
NTFS	Yes	Advanced metadata and reparse points may not be available. Filesystems using Windows Server Data Deduplication may present files as reparse points.
FAT	Yes	Filesystem recognition depends on the original format utility used
EXT4	Yes	Symlinks are not supported
XFS	Yes
ReFS	No
exFAT	No

Alternative solutions​

If your backup scenario uses an unsupported virtual disk partition type, or an unsupported filesystem type or filesystem feature, granular restore will not be available. In this case you can still achieve granular restore of individual files by first performing a full image restore, and then using a third-party tool to extract individual files from the virtual disk image file.

We recommend the following software:

7-Zip

• Free and Open Source, Windows (GUI) and macOS / Linux (command-line)

• Can open VMDK disk descriptor and also the individual extent files

  • Supports many filesystems, including NTFS, FAT32, EXT 2/3/4, UDF, HFS, SquashFS

  • Known issues:

  • When loading the VMDK disk descriptor directly instead of the extent files, if no partition table is present (i.e. "Raw byte range" containing the MBR/GPT area at the start of the disk was not selected for backup) then the descriptor will only show an interior 'disk.img' file instead of partition contents.. You can workaround this issue by opening the individual partition extent files

  • Early versions of 7-Zip had only limited support for disk image features. Please manually ensure your 7-Zip installation is up-to-date, as 7-Zip does not have a built-in software update feature.

DiskInternals Linux Reader

• Freeware, Windows-only

• Despite the product name, also supports Windows filesystems (NTFS, FAT)

• Can mount VMDK files as a drive letter from the menu > Drives > Mount Image > "VMware virtual disks (*.vmdk)"

• Known issues:

  • Fails to open the VMDK disk descriptor if there is junk data in "Raw byte range" areas. You can workaround this issue by editing the descriptor file to replace these with zero extents. e.g. edit disk.vmdk change RW 16065 FLAT "disk-f0000.vmdk" 0 to RW 16065 ZERO

Passmark OSFMount

• Freeware, Windows-only

• Can mount VMDK extent files as a drive letter

• Known issues:

  • When loading the VMDK disk descriptor directly instead of the extent files, the disk partitions can be discovered, but mounting fails - both of the individual partitions and also when attempting to mount the VMDK as a raw disk ("Physical Disk Emulation" mode). You can workaround this issue by selecting the individual extent files to mount (works using "Logical Drive Emulation" mode)