Patent ID: 8566640

Claim:
A system for recovering one or more virtual machines from an image level backup, comprising: a hypervisor configured to receive a selection of at least one virtual machine disk image file and at least one virtual machine configuration file corresponding to a virtual machine (VM) to be recovered, wherein the at least one virtual machine disk image file and the at least one virtual machine configuration file are included in the image level backup; a virtual storage communicatively coupled to the hypervisor and configured to receive contents of the image level backup from a data conversion engine; the data conversion engine configured to: receive a request for a data object from the hypervisor; determine at least one data portion of the image level backup, wherein the data portion includes the requested data object; perform content translation of the image level backup to extract contents of the data portion on-the-fly at the time the corresponding data object is requested by the hypervisor without fully extracting the image level backup; and represent the extracted contents in the virtual storage; wherein the hypervisor is configured to launch the VM, and wherein the hypervisor is configured to provide to the VM access to contents of the at least one virtual machine disk image the and the at least one virtual machine configuration file through the virtual storage; and a changes storage configured to store virtual disk data changes inflicted by recovery of the data object from the image level backup, wherein the changes storage is implemented using virtual storage logic.