Hi. This afternoon I removed backups of a VM and now it turns out these were possibly the only means I had to recover the deleted VM with. I'm wondering if there is a controlled way to use garbage collection to isolate chunks which are not now attached to any backups. That would at least give me the start of a means of reconstructing these backups. I realise there would then be other steps necessary but I've no other options I think. No prune has run since 00:00:02 today and the last GC finished at 00:48:39 so I know the data I need is there in the chunks :/
VM backup recover from chunks.
- Thread starter lhall
- Start date
not possible without the "manifest" (=the list of used chunks of the backup, also called snapshots)
Hi,
no that is not possible, as @_gabriel mentioned already, you need the index file in order to restore backups, as there the logical sequence of the referenced chunks is stored. Also, note that other snapshots might still reference some of the chunks, so simply collecting the unused chunks garbage collection would remove is not enough. And even if you have the right chunks, finding the correct combination for them to give you the logical sequence as required by the backup seems unfeasible.
Your best bet is to restore from an offsite backup. Or maybe you have a snapshot of the VM or the index files/datastore?