Disk Restore
I am observing some interesting behavior that I hope someone can clarify. Here's the scenario:
1. Did a full image backup of my c: drive yesterday and restored the image to an external drive
2. Did differential backup last night of c: drive
3. Restored the latest c: differential image to the external drive
I am running Windows 7 64 bit with the latest build of TI Home 2010 and the Plus Pack.
Observations:
1. C: drive occupies ~45GB (used space, not the size of the partition)
2. Full backup with normal compression is ~28GB (no surprises there)
3. The restore process (Trueimagehomeservice.exe) read 28GB (no surprises)
4. The restore process (Trueimagehomeservice.exe) wrote only 590,000 bytes!
The restore works fine, I am just amazed that it seems to be comparing what changed between the backup image and the drive I am restoring to. I would have expected it to write the whole 28GB back out to the disk. I am assuming that because I restored the backup disk yesterday, it only had to write 590,000 bytes to the backup drive to make it match the c: drive.
Can anyone verify that this is what's going on (although it must be because that's all the data that the process wrote as a result of running the restore). By the way, I got these numbers from Windows 7's task manager.
I can't speak for the technical details but remember TI is only writing the contents of a specific disk sector, not necessarily a full sector. Also, it is not writing the actual contents of the place holder only files but these occupy part of the final used restore. For me, I am not concerned about the how as long as it works.
Agreed. The first, second, third, and fourth priority for me is reliability! I just thought it was very interesting that it seemed to only be writing the changed sectors.
It's got me intrigued now though. I think I am going to quick format the external drive and restore again. Will see if task manager shows writing the full 28GB or whether the writes aren't reflected there.
Mike is asking: Does ATI choose what it has to restore based on what has changed since the backup?
I thought ATI restored all the image content, rewriting every backed up sector, except for the sectors in the place holder files (hiberfil.sys, pagefile.sys).
This last exception could explain why a XGB backup is rewriting only a smaller YGB of data.
Looks like Dev-Anon is correct. After deleting the partition on the backup drive, re-creating it and restoring, Task Manager still only showed 400K or so bytes written so it must be bypassing the normal write routines.
So Mike, your restore is OK, right? Were you just wondering about what Task Manager is reporting?
Yes. Restores are fine, was just curious when I saw how few bytes task manager was reporting being written.