Purpose
This article documents an alternate method to restore individual files when the File Level Restore fails or the filesystem is incompatible with the Guest OS File Recovery functionality of Veeam Backup & Replication.
Solution
Alternative Method for VMware Virtual Machines
If the data you are trying to restore is located on a single disk, a simpler alternative is to perform Instant Disk Recovery using an unoccupied SCSI node on the original machine. This will allow you to temporarily attach a restored copy of the disk to the VM and copy the required files. When complete, you then unmount the Instant Recovered disk.
More Information
This method can be used to restore files from any file system, which helps bypass the limitations of Windows FLR and multi-OS FLR.
Instant Recovery can usually be accomplished in minutes, but recovery of large VMs from deduplicating storage may take over an hour.
Instant Recovery to VMware does not require pre-allocating datastore space for the disk of the Instant Recovered VM.
Instant Recovery for Hyper-V will pre-allocate the entire size of the virtual disks if "Allocate required disk space before migration" is selected.
