True Image 2014: folders excluded from disk/partition backup are deleted from disk during restore!
Hello forum administrator,
I lived a catastrophic situation when I restored a disk partition backed-up with excluded user data folders (because the backup is intended as a system backup).
I've expected to see the excluded folders on disk untouched from the restore process, but actually they were ALL DELETED!! It seems to be a bug in your tool (?), as the info about which are the folder excluded from backup is present. I couldn't find any option specifying how should be treated (on the destination disk) the excluded folders during restore (delete them or leave them as they are).
Is there any workaround to avoid this annoying & destroying behavior?
hello shadowsports,
yes, you're interpreting the case correctly.
Stated in shorter way: you have your own data located on the same partition as the system (C:) and you want to manage separately the backups: file backup for the data and disk/partition backup for the system. So you exclude your own folders from the disk/partition backup, thinking, on restore the excluded folders will remain untouched on your disk. Instead, they will deleted!
According to a online support chat I've had, to avoid loosing your own data when recovering from the backup archive(s), you could:
- either have a single, common disk/partition backup (i.e. NO exclusions of user data)
- or, having the two backups (disk/partition with exclusions and file backup) managed separately, do first the restore from the disk/partition (->which erases your data on disk), then recover your data by restoring them from the file backup.
Quite cumbersome and time-consuming in both variants...
I believe you also would have had another option which is to use your existing disk image backup but do a file recovery rather than a partition recovery.
This should leave the existing files untouched. The downside would be if you were having boot or other issues, not doing a disk image or partition image recovery may not correct any problems.
Acrojo,
This is probably repeating what was said but maybe saying is a little differently will help.
When a disk/partition backup is restored, it is totally replacing the whole partition with whatever is in the backup. If something has been excluded from the backup it will not be on the disk with the restore is done. When a file backup is restored, it restores what is in the backup and leaves the remaining information on the target disk. This is the designed difference between a disk/partition and file backup. All backup software that create a disk/partition backup do this.
I use disk/partition backup for that portion of the system where leaving some files on the partition is likely to break the system. Like when I need to restore a miss-functioning operating system. So when you create a disk/partition backup, especially for the OS partition, it is essential to make sure it contains the whole OS and all things it depends on to run.
The chat person is correct. If you want to manage the user data separately from the OS you have to create two backups and restore them in the order stated. This is normal for most backup software I've used. The easiest reliable way to restore a non-functioning OS from a backup is to use a partition restore. (Sometimes it is possible to 'fix' the OS with files from a backup, but this means knowing a whole lot of detail about how the OS works.)
Another way to separate the user data from the OS is to create a second partition on the disk, say D: and move the user data there. There are ways on Windows to redirect the default Documents and other user data to the other partition. The details of which are beyond the scope of this post.
Thanks to all the contributors above!
In fact, I agree with all the workarounds presented as possible solutions with their (dis)advantages. With the ever bigger PC disks the time optimization for a backup or restore operation becomes a primordial role (my opinion, mainly at home). The system files do not change such quickly as the user data, so you may wish to schedule the backup of your system once a month, but daily for your data.
Using a separate partition for the user own data may be the simplest solution, but you could be confronted soon with a needed change of partition size (eg. system partition became too tight).
Finally I opted for the following strategy (system and user data on same partition)
- disk/partition backup of the system at rare intervals (eg. monthly) eventually excluding the folders of user own data
- file backup (of user own data) daily.
In this way the (small & quick) file backups permit a handy recovery, if needed, of the user data. Should once a system recovery be necessary, one does first the partition restore (of the system) followed by the file restore (of user data).