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Exporting Disks

You can restore computer disks from volume-level backups and convert them to disks of the VMDK, VHD or VHDX format.

During disks restore, Veeam Backup & Replication creates standard virtual disks that can be used by VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V VMs.

When you restore a disk in the VMDK format, Veeam Backup & Replication creates a pair of files that make up the VM virtual disk: a descriptor file and file with the virtual disk content.
When you restore a disk in the VHD/VHDX format, Veeam Backup & Replication creates a file of the VHD or VHDX format.

You can save converted disks locally on any server added to the backup infrastructure or place disks on a datastore connected to an ESXi host (for VMDK disk format only). VMDK disks can be restored as thin provision and thick provision disks:

Disks restored to a datastore are saved in the thin provisioned format.
Disks restored to a server are saved in the thick provisioned format.

VHD/VHDX disks are always restored as dynamically expanding.

Veeam Backup & Replication supports batch disk restore. For example, if you choose to restore 2 computer disks, Veeam Backup & Replication will convert them to 2 virtual disks and store these disks in the specified location.

Exporting Disks IMPORTANT

Consider the following:

If the backup from which you restore disks contains a Btrfs storage pool, during the disk restore process Veeam Backup & Replication will create a separate disk and restore the Btrfs pool to this disk.
If the disk you want to restore contains an LVM volume group, Veeam Agent will restore the original disk and the LVM volume group as 2 separate disks. Among other things, this leads to the increase of the required storage space. For example, you restore a machine with 2 disks, and a separate LVM volume group is configured on each of these disks. In this case, Veeam Agent will restore 4 disks. The restored disks will consume storage space equal to the size of 2 original disks and 2 LVM volume groups from these disks.

The procedure of volume-level restore from a standalone Veeam Agent backup does not differ from the same procedure for a backup created with Veeam Agent that operates in the managed mode. To learn more, see the Exporting Disks section in the Veeam Agent Management Guide.