Restore, Instant Recovery & V2V

NGBackup restores range from a single file to a whole VM booted in seconds — and even into a different hypervisor.

Instant Recovery and cross-hypervisor restore

Restore files (console)

/opt/backup/bin/backup-console
* restore

Choose a selection method (most common is “Select the most recent backup”), pick the client, then browse and mark what you want:

cd /etc
mark passwd
mark hosts
done

Confirm the restore job. By default files land in /tmp/bacula-restores so you never overwrite originals — change the destination (where=) in the dialog when you’re ready. Full directive control is in the Job resource (Where, Replace, Restore Client, …).

Granular restore

Descend into a backed-up VM’s guest filesystem (ext2/3/4, NTFS) and pull individual files or folders — no full-disk rehydration. Incremental chains are folded over the Full automatically.

Instant Recovery

Boot a backed-up VM directly from backup storage over NBD, iSCSI, NFS-Datastore or SMB-VHDX — production is back in seconds while the disk migrates to permanent storage in the background (svMotion / qm migrate / virsh blockcopy), with zero downtime.

Cross-hypervisor V2V

Restore a VM into a hypervisor different from the one it was backed up on — Proxmox, Hyper-V, KVM, vSphere, CloudStack, Nutanix — with automatic disk-format conversion (qcow2 / raw / vmdk / VHDX) and native VM-config generation. See the per-hypervisor plugin pages for the exact restore parameters.

Bootstrap files

For scripted or disaster-recovery restores, NGBackup can drive the Storage Daemon from a bootstrap file that pinpoints the exact volumes and records to read — the fastest possible recovery path.