How to restore individual items by using Granular Recovery Technology

You can use Granular Recovery Technology (GRT) to restore certain individual items from backup sets. For example, you can restore an email message from an Exchange backup without having to restore the entire mailbox. Or, you can restore a SharePoint list without restoring the entire site.

To restore individual items, the Granular Recovery Technology feature must be enabled when you create a backup job.

GRT is enabled by default for backups for the following agents:

Active Directory Recovery Agent
Agent for Microsoft Exchange Server
Agent for Microsoft Virtual Server
Agent for Microsoft SharePoint
Agent for VMWare Virtual Infrastructure

You can restore either full backup sets or individual items from GRT-enabled backups.

The following table lists the individual items you can restore for each agent.

Table: Individual items that can be recovered for each agent

Agent	Individual items
Active Directory Recovery Agent	You can restore the following individual items: Active Directory objects and attributes Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM) and Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS) objects and attributes
Agent for Microsoft Exchange Server	You can restore the following individual items: Mailboxes Mail messages and their attachments Public folders
Agent for Microsoft Virtual Server	You can restore drives, folders, and files from virtual machines that run a Windows operating system.
Agent for Microsoft SharePoint	You can restore the following individual items: Portal sites and their associated databases Windows SharePoint Services sites and their associated databases Document library stores (Web Storage System-based) Individual documents that are contained in Document or Picture libraries (Web Storage System-based or Microsoft SQL Server-based) Lists, sites, and sub-sites
Windows Servers Agent for VMware Virtual Infrastructure	You can restore drives, folders, and files from virtual machines that run a Windows operating system.

When you run a GRT-enabled backup job, Backup Exec creates media with an IMG prefix (for example, IMG00001). IMG media is a specific media type that Backup Exec creates only for GRT-enabled backup operations. When you run a GRT-enabled backup job, the IMG media stores the backup data.

Note:

Backup-to-disk folders do not support encryption for GRT-enabled jobs.

You should consider which device you use for GRT-enabled backups before you begin. You should also consider any special requirements for the type of data you back up.