Is Granular Backup as Good as Running a Backup Inside the VM?

Granular Backup is an innovation of ours and uses the same VSS mechanisms as a full backup. It should give you the same file perspective as being inside the VM. Thus it saves you time and money and nothing needs to be installed/managed inside the VM. Probably because it saves you money you won’t find this feature in many other tools…

If the VM is Linux there may be exceptions where file system access doesn’t work in some cases (but you’ll know when you try to set it up) due to the kind of file system not being directly supported. In those cases a regular Hyper-V backup needs to be taken. Another exception is checkpoints / snapshots: you can’t use Granular Backup on a VM with checkpoints. You would need to delete those first. Note that Microsoft strongly recommends against using checkpoints on production systems anyways
You’ll find detailed walk-throughs in the Tutorial section of the User Guide with details on how to set up Granular Backup and here as well