BE 2012: Any way to restore files without staging a VM?

[MIXIT]

Just a general question but every time I need to restore files that are found within a Hyper-V VM, it requires re-staging the entire VM which is a 500GB or larger vhd file.  Is there any means of having the files accessible without this re-staging?  I don't have the option of trial & error due to this being a production environment however it occured to me perhaps to add a 2nd stage to the backup and have that be some form of Files & Folder backup for the VM, and then let the standard full b ackup run that covers all files/state info on the host, and the Hyper-V agent-based backups for the virtual machines.  Does that sound like how it should work or is there an option I'v enot considered? 

If I install BE 2014, does this scenario change? 

Thank you. 

[CraigV · Accepted solution]

Hi,

GRT-based backups to tape of an application or VM will always stage to disk first. No way around this.

If the GRT backup is directed to disk first, then there is no need to stage.

You can duplicate the backup to disk, but you will be doing something manually that the restore does automatically.

Thanks!

[VJware]

The idea of a virtual agent is to have a single-pass backup of your VM which allows you to restore the complete VM and also individual files/folders from a single backup.

Your alternative of adding a second stage for a File/Folder backup is actually running a second backup along with the complete VM backup which is not needed since you can accomplish both the recovery scenarios with one backup itself.

[MIXIT]

Thanks for the information guys.  I'd actually like to do a 2nd bacxkup to disk anyway for DR purposes, just that the last time I tried, I tried doikng the deuplication thing and that did not work out well.  If memory serves, the OS didn't support my 4TB USB-attached drive...Guid partition table I think it was (2008 R2 didn't support it).  Ok I will suffer through the staging process for now until I can add a disk-based backup in there too.  Thanks again.