Patent ID: 8332689

Claim:
A system for recovering one or more virtual machines from an image level backup, comprising: a virtual storage communicatively coupled to a hypervisor and configured to receive contents of an image level backup file from a data conversion engine; the data conversion engine configured to: receive a request for a data object from the hypervisor, wherein the hypervisor is configured to receive a selection of at least one virtual machine disk image file corresponding to a virtual machine (VM) to be recovered, and wherein the at least one virtual machine disk image file is included in the image level backup file; determine at least one data portion of the image level backup file, wherein the data portion includes the requested data object; perform a translation of the image level backup file to extract contents of the data portion responsive to the request for the data object by the hypervisor, without fully extracting the image level backup; and represent the extracted contents in the virtual storage, wherein the virtual storage is farther configured to provide the hypervisor with access to contents of the at least one virtual machine disk image file from the image-level backup file.