During a quarterly disaster-recovery exercise, you must recover the most recent backup of a 200 GB departmental file share so the help-desk team can validate permissions. The live share is still serving users from E:\DeptFiles, and management insists that no production files be renamed or overwritten. You have created an empty folder at *D:\LabRestore* to hold the recovered data. Which restore method offered by most enterprise backup utilities best satisfies these requirements?
An alternate-location-path restore directs the backup application to place recovered files in a completely different path or volume than the one recorded in the backup catalog. Because the data is written only to D:\LabRestore, nothing in E:\DeptFiles is touched, making it ideal for test restores or situations where the original path is unavailable. A side-by-side restore also avoids overwriting files, but it still places the data in the original share-typically by adding a suffix such as _RESTORED-so it does not meet the requirement. The overwrite method replaces existing files in place, risking data loss, and a bare-metal restore rebuilds an entire system rather than restoring a single file share.