Use the Hyper-V file-level recovery (FLR) feature to restore individual files from a Windows or Linux VM to the original VM or to another machine running the same operating system as the original. The restore target machine can be a physical or virtual machine and does not need to be a protected client of the backup system. You can perform file-level recovery using local and replicated backups. File-level recovery procedures are the same for clustered and non-clustered VMs. You may simultaneously run one file-level recovery session for each protected VM.
When you create a recovery image for a Windows VM, the virtual machine hard drives are exposed as both a CIFS (Samba) share and an iSCSI LUN. You then choose to map the share or LUN to the restore target machine so data can be copied to the desired location. For a Linux VM, the VM hard drives are exposed as an iSCSI LUN.
You must use iSCSI LUN mapping for the following:
| • | To recover access control information on files and folders for Windows systems. |
| • | To recover NTFS encrypted files. |
| • | To perform file-level recovery for Linux VMs. |
Note: For the restore process, iSCSI disks are writable and a 1 GB write limit is enforced. If the restore process requires more than 1 GB, you will see OS errors on the restore target machine. If this happens, restore the VM rather than individual files. See Restoring Hyper-V virtual machines for details. For Windows machines, you can recover files using the procedure described in To restore a Hyper-V VM to an alternate location.