Restore Hyper-V VM + Checkpoints From Backup

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Restore Hyper-V VM + Checkpoints From Backup

Pascal 21

Hi there,

I need to restore a virtual machine with Checkpoints from backup - I deleted the snapshot and since determined I need it.

I thought this would be a simple case of restoring the vhdx, avhdx files and snapshots folder in ProgramData while the Virtual Machine Management service is stopped but this hasn't done the the trick and the checkpoint still doesn't show in Hyper-V Manager.

OS is Windows 10 Professional w/Hyper-V

Thanks in advance!

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Answer 1

No Body 71

You can always restore a VM from the files, if you have all of them. Worst case you don't need the VM configuration file, you would simply create a new VM and select the most recent (by file date) AVHD/AVHDX file as the hard drive. Note, however, that the VM will work but if you don't have the VM config, the checkpoints will not be individually listed. So importing, as you did, solves that problem, provided that you still have the VMCX file.
For that reason it's best to take a backup of the VM before deleting important checkpoints or changing VM settings. You could do this by exporting, which creates a full copy each time, or for very little money get a professional backup tool that backs up the VMs automatically with dedupe to save space and time. Another thing to keep in mind is that checkpoints increase the potential for VM corruption. They are awesome for development and testing purposes, but they are not recommended on production VMs.

Pascal 21 Reputation points

2022-08-09T16:18:22.997+00:00

Thanks for this - very helpful!

For reference, this is my personal machine I was performing this work on, particularly my Linux Mint VM running my UniFi Network Appliance - use Hyper-V regularly at work on my day job (hence the attraction in the first place) and have even run into some inherited customer environments with 5-7 year old checkpoints that were a mess to clean up, so I know full well the dangers along with the benefits.

If it was being used for business, I would invest in a more professional backup solution and follow closer to best practice, but Macrium Free image-based backups of all drives on the host have been splendid for my use case, especially considering my VM's are not critical if I lose them (beyond the pain of spending several hours setting them up again). I primarily use checkpoints due to my very limited trust in the Linux Mint OS they're running as they have a tendency of breaking whenever the hell they feel like it, particularly when they decide to do updates.

For this reason, when they're in a known working state, I take a checkpoint. I periodically manually perform updates on the VM's, then once confirming it's working delete/merge the checkpoints and create a fresh one. Know this is not a "best practice" use of them, but have helped a few times already and would have helped again this time too if I (clearly) hadn't noticed there were issues back when I did my last checkpoint. There are snapshots configured in Mint itself but sadly these only go back a month, so also don't help my Mint issue either.

Answer 2

Pascal 21

Update: Managed to fix by deleting VM and associated files, then performing an import on Hyper-V manager which brought back the VM along with its checkpoints.

Downside is that even reverting to checkpoint the VM still has the issue I was trying to fix, so it was all for nothing, but that's another whole problem for me to solve...

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Restore Hyper-V VM + Checkpoints From Backup

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