vzdump: add section about single file restore

[pve-docs.git] / vzdump.adoc

diff --git a/vzdump.adoc b/vzdump.adoc
index b8ea081d58a2dcd914d9ba81f1ba0ea179dc26b0..0937fe2a0943b450da6c2c956dcec3be06049801 100644 (file)
--- a/vzdump.adoc
+++ b/vzdump.adoc
@@ -365,6 +365,30 @@ amount of data is required for initial operation, e.g. web servers - once the OS
 and necessary services have been started, the VM is operational, while the
 background task continues copying seldomly used data.
 
 and necessary services have been started, the VM is operational, while the
 background task continues copying seldomly used data.
 

+Single File Restore
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+
+The 'File Restore' button in the 'Backups' tab of the storage GUI can be used to
+open a file browser directly on the data contained in a backup. This feature
+is only available for backups on a Proxmox Backup Server.
+
+For containers, the first layer of the file tree shows all included 'pxar'
+archives, which can be opened and browsed freely. For VMs, the first layer shows
+contained drive images, which can be opened to reveal a list of supported
+storage technologies found on the drive. In the most basic case, this will be an
+entry called 'part', representing a partition table, which contains entries for
+each partition found on the drive. Note that for VMs, not all data might be
+accessible (unsupported guest file systems, storage technologies, etc...).
+
+Files and directories can be downloaded using the 'Download' button, the latter
+being compressed into a zip archive on the fly.
+
+To enable secure access to VM images, which might contain untrusted data, a
+temporary VM (not visible as a guest) is started. This does not mean that data
+downloaded from such an archive is inherently safe, but it avoids exposing the
+hypervisor system to danger. The VM will stop itself after a timeout. This
+entire process happens transparently from a user's point of view.
+

 [[vzdump_configuration]]
 Configuration
 -------------
 [[vzdump_configuration]]
 Configuration
 -------------