After a scare this past weekend, I decided to test out my backups by doing a restore of a Hyper-V guest. Good thing, because I'm running into an issue.
We have two Windows Server 2012 servers acting as Hyper-V hosts. Both of these machines backup using Windows Server Backup to a shared drive on a Windows 7 Pro computer.
That shared drive is physically a Tandberg Data Quikstor. If you've never seen a Quickstor, it's a box that hooks up to a computer via USB and uses little ejectable hard drives for storage. Think tape drive, but little hard drives instead of tape carts.
I wanted to test a scenario where one of our Hyper-V guests was completely hosed and needed to be restored from a backup. I set up a new Windows 2012 server, installed the Hyper-V and hooked up the Quickstor directly to the server.
I fired up Windows Server Backup and tried to do a restore of one Hyper-V guest. The restore immediately fails with the error "You can only recover entire volumes from backups stored on DVDs or removable media. File recovery is not supported."
I guess the error is self explanatory but it took me by surprise. Because I stored my backups on what amounts to a removable hard drive I lose the ability to restore individual files? That seems like a strange restriction, just about any offsite backup is going to involve removable storage.
Are there any workarounds to this issue? What if I backed up directly to the hard drive of the Windows 7 machine? Could I then use that backup to restore individual files?