AVVI Granular Restore
I have recently started using the VMWare Agent to backup our VM's (previously using VCB). I have a policy in place to perform full backups on weekends and differentials on weekdays, both with GRT enabled for file level restores.
I had a request from a user to restore a file from one of the VM's protected by this policy. The user needed a version backed up by one of the weekday differentials. When I ran the restore, BE requested the media from the previous weekends full backup. This was a pain since that media had just gone off site that morning. When I made the selection in the restore job, only the media for the differential backup was listed.
Is it normal for a differential restore from a VM to require the previous full backup?
Running:
Backup Exec 2010 R3 build 5204
vSphere 4.0.0 build 208111
ESX 4.0
VMware backups are block level, so if the file was present in full backup then differential must have picked up only changes. And so to restore the entire file it will need both full and differential set.