Skip to main content

Restoring a backup after reinstalling Windows 10

Thread needs solution

I recently ran into a problem with a Windows 10 update that resulted in having to reinstall Windows 10. My drive C was completely wiped clean, meaning that all of my programs now need to be reinstalled. Drive E (a separate physical drive) was not affected and that's where much of my data is stored.

I have a cloud backup of both drives from September 20, four days before the Windows problem occurred, but when I select Drive C to be restored, I get a message saying "The selected destination hard disk is not empty. If you continue, all data the disk contains will be deleted." Is it safe to allow the restore to continue or will that just mess up my newly installed Windows? I'm not real tech-savvy, so I'm reluctant to take chances -- but I sure would like to restore all my programs without having to finds disks and download files one by one. I'd appreciate any advice on how to proceed. This is what the list to be recovered looks like:

image

0 Users found this helpful

Tom, welcome to my User Forums.

Have you created the ATI 2018 Rescue Media and are you booting from this media when you are attempting to recover your Windows OS drive from the Acronis Cloud?

If you are attempting this from within Windows then you may run in to other issues, especially if you are connecting to the Cloud via a wireless connection / network adapter, as ATI will need to restart the computer in order to wipe the target drive for the recovery, and the recovery environment may not have any support for wireless connections.

Please note that you cannot just recover your installed Windows applications / programs without also recovering the whole disk drive / partition where Windows was installed.

I would recommend creating and booting from the ATI 2018 Rescue Media before attempting anything else.  Once booted in to the ATI recovery environment, check to see if you have network connectivity to the Acronis Cloud.

Next, whilst still booted from the rescue media, make a full backup of your freshly installed copy of Windows 10 to an external backup drive - this is your protection against having to start all over again should something go wrong.

Once you have made the full backup, then you can start trying to recover your September 20th cloud backup back to your Windows drive from the Acronis Cloud.  I would recommend using a wired network connection for best performance / reliability as this can be a long running process.

Please ensure that when selecting the target for the recovery that you select the correct disk drive.  If you are able to temporarily disconnect your data drive E: during the process, this will ensure that no mistakes are made that could endanger the data on that second drive.