I am running win7 on a VM. I have Microsoft SQL Server 2014 downloaded on the VM. I have an external drive with a .bak file that I wish to restore a database with. The database is 400+ GBs. My local disk cannot support a database of this size, but my external drive can. How do I run SQL Server locally and restore from and keep the database files externally?
You can create database then configure it for files run on external drive. Then try to restore it. Creating db on another folder example here: Create a database using T SQL on a specified location