Hi, I’m using Duplicati 2.0.7.1_beta_2023-05-25 to backup Hyper-V virtual machines on a Windows 10 host.
When restoring to a different host, the files restore fine, but I’m not able to import the virtual machine into Hyper-V manager.
I get an error referencing a missing VMRS file during the import. As I understand it, the VMRS file contains the running guest state.
I’ve had a look at backup job, and other than selecting the Hyper-V guest to backup, there doesn’t appear to be any other options I need to set.
I can still get the restored machine working, but only by recreating a new virtual machine configuration and attaching the restored virtual disk to it.
Just wondering if anyone else had come across this and knew what I needed to do to fix
If I had to guess, I would say that the issue is that non-server versions of Windows don’t have access to all of the features of the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) for Hyper-V. Due to this, certain files can’t be “snapshotted” during the backup.
If you check the logs of your backup, you will probably see something similar to this:
As far as I know, there is no way to “fix” this. For my part, I just live with the knowledge that if I need to restore any of my Hyper-V VMs, I will need to restore the files and then reassemble the VM manually.
Edit: After thinking on it for a moment, there is a “fix”, which is to use Windows Server instead of 10/11. For people like me, that is cost-prohibitive at the moment, and so I make due with this limitation.
Ahh - thanks for that - makes sense. Yes, I have checked my log and I am seeing that message. I think its safe to assume that this is a limitation of using Windows 10 as a host. At some stage I might download a server trial and test it out to confirm.
