VM Recovery: "Overwrite the Existing One" vs "Create a New One" — Which Do You Actually Want?
  

George Fady Lv2Posted 2026-Aug-11 21:22

my as a technical support Got asked this enough times that it's worth writing up: if you need to roll a VM back to last night's backup, and you don't want a second VM sitting around afterward, which recovery option is correct — Overwrite the existing one, or Create a new one?
  
Answer: Overwrite the existing one. The word "delete" in that wizard step scares people, but it only refers to discarding today's current (broken) disk state — not deleting the VM itself. After the operation, the VM keeps the same name, VMID, MAC address, UUID, and network config, so there's nothing to reconnect or reassign afterward.
  
"Create a new one" is a different tool — it spins up a second, independent VM with a new identity, and you'll be doing manual network reconfiguration. Only use that if you actually need both VMs to exist side by side.
  
Steps:
  

  • Compute page → select the VM → More → Backups (or Reliability → Scheduled Backup / CDP).

  • Click Recover on the previous night's backup.

  • Choose "Overwrite the existing one."

  • Confirm — VM shuts down, data is replaced, comes back up as the same VM.

  • Log in and verify the issue is gone and config is intact.

  
Things to plan for: there's downtime while it recovers (depends on backup size), today's changes/newly installed apps get wiped since it's a full revert, and any snapshots on the VM get deleted as part of the operation — confirm in advance if you need to preserve any.

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ND Lv3Posted 2026-Aug-12 14:00
  
Worth a one-liner on how to verify the backup is actually "last night's" - for example, checking the timestamp in the list before hitting Recover — since picking the wrong restore point is probably the second most common mistake after the Overwrite/Create confusion.
Humayun Ahmed Lv4Posted 2026-Aug-12 12:59
  
Thanks to share!