SYSTEMS AND METHODS TO PROCESS BLOCK-LEVEL BACKUP FOR SELECTIVE FILE RESTORATION FOR VIRTUAL MACHINES

摘要

A data storage system protects virtual machines using block-level backup operations and restores the data at a file level. The system accesses the virtual machine file information from the file allocation table of the host system underlying the virtualization layer. A file index associates this virtual machine file information with the related protected blocks in a secondary storage device during the block-level backup. Using the file index, the system can identify the specific blocks in the secondary storage device associated with a selected restore file. As a result, file level granularity for restore operations is possible for virtual machine data protected by block-level backup operations without restoring more than the selected file blocks from the block-level backup data.

主权项

1. A method to process block-level data protection of virtual machine files for selective file-level restoration in a data management system, the method comprising:
automatically identifying with computer hardware an information store comprising virtual files associated with a virtual machine, wherein the virtual machine is associated with a media agent and a host operating system having a file allocation table (FAT) comprising file location information for each virtual file within the information store, wherein the media agent accesses the FAT during a block-level backup of the virtual machine; automatically transferring with the computer hardware blocks of data comprising virtual files to be backed up from the information store to a secondary storage device to create transferred blocks of data in the secondary storage device; automatically updating with the computer hardware a file index associating a location of each block of data in the information store with a location of a corresponding transferred block of data in the secondary storage device; and automatically associating in the file index with the computer hardware the file location information for the virtual files to be backed up in each block of data with the location of the corresponding transferred block of data in the secondary storage device.