Recover files from Hyper-V VM checkpoints

josiahmb

6/29/24, 4:30 PM

this is my first time posting here, so apologize in advance if I am doing something wrong.

Here is our environment

Hyper V host server

windows server 2019 standard
HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8
2x Xeon E5-2690 v2
128GB RAM

Hyper V VM in question

windows server 2012 R2 standard
8 vcpu
12GB RAM
2 VHD, 1 for C drive and 1 for D drive

Here is the issue we are having

On Monday there was a power outage for this host. when the power came up, all the VMs booted up like normal except for the one in question. when this VM came back online, the D drive had reverted back to September 2022.

We assume the cause is, this VM had checkpoints all the way back to 2020, and we can see in our logs that the last time the server was rebooted was the same time in September 2022. so we are thinking that the checkpoint file that the server was using from September 2022 until Monday (06-26-23) got corrupted during the power outage and when the server booted back up, it booted from the last checkpoint file available, being September 2022.

I have already tried making a copy of the VM (and all its VHDX and checkpoint files) and importing that back to hyper v and merging the checkpoints. I was hoping that would merge back in the latest changes. it did not.

does anyone know of something else we can try to recover the missing files?

Thank you in advance for any help!

0 + 3

backup

hyper-v

backup-restoration

checkpoint

djdomi

6/29/24, 5:57 PM

check your backups. mostly even if you would have checkpoint from the last century, the start of your journey is still a valid backup and the last file of the vm hard disk file. look on google for an offline merge, had a similar situation in the past

Greg Askew

6/29/24, 7:19 PM

`this VM had checkpoints all the way back to 2020`.There are many reasons why checkpoints are rarely appropriate in production other than temporary use. Then there is this, which is another level further - we didn't know it had checkpoints for three years until something blew up.

josiahmb

6/30/24, 3:37 PM

Thanks for the input. Unfortunately, we don't have backups of this machine.

Elon Musk

I sit in a Tesla and translated this thread with Ai:

EN: Recover files from Hyper-V VM checkpoints

Post an answer

Most people don’t grasp that asking a lot of questions unlocks learning and improves interpersonal bonding. In Alison’s studies, for example, though people could accurately recall how many questions had been asked in their conversations, they didn’t intuit the link between questions and liking. Across four studies, in which participants were engaged in conversations themselves or read transcripts of others’ conversations, people tended not to realize that question asking would influence—or had influenced—the level of amity between the conversationalists.