Example apparatus and methods use two types of storage to improve boot time associated with recovering a virtual machine running on a hypervisor. The first storage is deduplication based and the second storage is not deduplication based. Example apparatus and methods may read data from the first storage to support operations immediately upon the VM booting and until a full recovery has been completed. Example apparatus and methods may also write a snapshot to the second storage and then support random input/output for the virtual machine from the snapshot in the second storage immediately upon the VM booting until a full recovery has been completed. Having dual devices facilitates using deduplication storage for deduplication-centric I/O while non-deduplication storage is used for random I/O while transfer of a recovery image from a backup device to a primary device associated with the VM is completed.