System image restored to wrong disk
Yesterday evening I experienced a very scary thing. Let me start by describing what my environment looks like.
1 SSD called SYSTEM used as my system (Windows 7 x64) disk
1 SSD called P3D used exclusively for Prepar3D (flight simulator stuff)
1 HDD called DATA used as a data disk (where I keep all my installation media etc)
1 HDD called BACKUP used as a backup disk (where I keep system images made by AOMEI Backupper but also manually backed up data)
What I did yesterday was to initiate a system restore from inside AB and just as normal I was told I was about to perform a system restore, that the computer needs to be restarted etc. Since I did this late yesterday night once the computer restarted and the restore process began I checked the 'Shutdown computer when done' option and went to bed.
This morning when I started my PC I got an error message from Dropbox saying it couldn't find the Dropbox folder. I found this very weird and was almost chocked when I found after opening Explorer that my DATA disk was gone after yesterday's system restore and instead I had two disks called SYSTEM. After a more thorough look I found what happened was that AOMEI for whatever reason didn't restore the system image to my system disk but instead to my DATA disk which was then re-partitioned to match the partitions in the image file.
Luckily my BACKUP disk contains all data that was lost on my DATA drive so now that I finally managed to get rid of the 'System reserved' partition on the DATA disk that created by AOMEI as part of the system image restore process by using the cmd line diskpart program with the 'override' switch I'm now in the process of restoring all data.
I guess what happened was that the drive letters didn't match up outside Windows but what I would like to know is why this happened now because I restored my system using the exact same disks numerous times without a single issue. The only issue I once had similar to this one actually was a couple of months ago when my BACKUP disk disappeared during a system restore operation. When that happened I went back to version 2.2 of AOMEI Backupper since I NEVER had an issue with that old version. However now I thought maybe it's time to move up to the most current version with Win10 coming down the road etc and then I get this problem.
So...not sure if I maybe should go back to version 2.2 again because using these later versions of AOMEI Backupper has started to get me real scared! So far I've been lucky enough to be able to sort the mess up using my own backups but who knows what will happen next time...
Would really appreciate some input, here's a link to a zip containing the log files from last night. Maybe they can help you help me understand why this happened and what to do to make sure it won't happen again.
Thanks in advance,
Richard
Comments
Hi, It's so glad to hear that you didn't lose any data !
The reason why this happen may be like what you said. When you were required to restart your computer, it entered PE, so it might be because Backupper under PE chose the wrong disk.
Anyway , I have submitted your issue and log files to the developers.
And I suggest you keep using version 2.2 and wait for version 3.0 which is coming up these days. Version 2.8 has some bugs for now.
Thanks for submitting this issue.
Sounds good Brian, thanks for your response and I'm looking forward to version 3.0 and I might even consider to buy the full software. Not because I feel an urgent need for the extra features in the full version but only because I really like your software and use it a lot and have been for quite some time now.
For now whenever I need to restore my system disk I do this by booting from a bootable media I created so I get the chance to see what it will do before it actually does it.
Because there's no way in the current version to initiate a system restore from inside Windows and then get to choose the parameters on what image to restore, where to restore it and so on from inside the Windows PE environment, correct? If you initiate the system restore from inside Windows it will just use those settings and start with the restore right away after the computer restarted, right?
Noticed version 3.0 is now available but do I dare to try a system restore from inside Windows again...?
Since my last post I've performed a number of successful system restore operations but all of them have been using the bootable media so I get to see to what disk the system image will actually be restored before it start the restore operation.
Would be great to have an option where you can initiate the restore process from the Windows UI but still after the computer restarted in Windows PE mode you will still have the chance to verify the restore parameters before the actual restore starts so you get a chance verifying everything is correct.
Did you get any response from the developers yet and did anything related to my issue discussed here change in version 3? I checked the change log but couldn't find anything specific to the issue I experienced.
Took my chances after assusing I had a good backup and gave version 3 a go and I'm happy to tell you it worked out just fine restoring from inside Windows again.