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What the heck happened

edited September 2015 in AOMEI Products Support

My computer has 3 phsyical drives C:boot     F: Data   M:Backup

I make a sytem image of the C drive and located it on M: So far so good

I thought I would try restoring so I launced the program and did a system restore

It restored the C drive but it completely wiped my F drive and all its programs

Under Disk Management it showed up as unallocated space and had to be reformatted and now I have to reload all applications


What went wrong

Window 8.1 pro

Latest version of AOEMI Backupper

Comments

  • Very sorry for the problem, it seems that after the computer reboot to restore, the program didn't recognize the C: drive, so it restore to a wrong drive. In this case, you can create a WINPE boot disk, then boot from the disk to do the restoration. Sincerely apologize for the problem caused you. 

  • I have experienced the exact same thing myself and in my case it was my main data drive containing thousands of personal pictures etc that got wiped. Thankfully I have a backup disk containing the very same content so part from having to restore hundreds of GBs at least I didn't loose my data.


    Since this apparently can happen every now and then for whatever reason I really think you should look into how to make sure it can't before someone ends up in the same situation we did but not as lucky as we are, in Dan's case being able to reinstall the lost applications and in my case having a backup of all data that was lost. I can only imagine how I would have felt if I didn't have had the backup loosing years of private pictures and movies...


    One easy way would be to add an option where you're always required to confirm on what disk the backup will be restored and this confirmation should not be within the GUI in Windows but in the PE after the computer has rebooted since I think that is where the problem is...that sometimes the numbering of disks can be different in Windows from what it will be in PE after a reboot making the backup being restored onto the wrong disk which could lead to a disaster.

  • Sure you can do that to be 100% safe but if you restore your system partiton frequently it becomes rather annoying having to disconnect all your other drives whenever you want to perform a system restore.


    And again...considering the disaster this kind of issue could possibly result in I do think something should be done preventing it like adding an option in the way I suggested in my previous post where you can never perform a system restore unless you first confirm (within Windows PE after reboot) that the disk that will be used to restore the system to indeed is the disk you want.

  • This just happened to me, for the 2nd time. It happened a few months ago after I upgraded to 2.5 and I went back to 2.2. When 2.8 was released, I installed it and used it a number of times, including restoring the system a few times. Today when I restored, it restored to a 2TB data drive instead of the system drive. I am trying to recover the partition at the moment, but I suspect this will be the last time I use Aomei Backupper. Most of the more important personal data is backed up, but a large collection, more than 1Tb, of bootleg music is gone.

  • The problem is not when you initiate a system restore from bootable media but when you initiate it from inside Windows.

    When you initiate a system restore using bootable media you will always have the chance to manually choose what disk you want to restore the system image to. However when initiating a system restore from within Windows that's when the problem might occur because what can happen is that the disk you choose in the Windows GUI might not be the disk the system image in fact is restored to once the computer is rebooted.

    I guess the reason for this is that sometimes the numbering of the drives will not be the same inside Windows and in the Windows PE environment after the computer has been rebooted.

    This is why I would like to see an option where the system restore will never start before you confirmed (after the computer has been rebooted and inside the Windows PE environment) that the disk chosen to restore the system image to in fact is the correct disk where you want the system image restored.

  • Spot on, WebMaximus. I would normally watch the restore, but this particular time I was called to the phone, took longer than I expected, and when I returned the restore had finished. I had been expecting it to wait for some input.


    I was hoping I could recover at least some of it but it seems it is not to be. The backup drive is the one that got deleted last time and which I have been trying to recover since, so no backup this time.

  • Really sorry to hear about your problem Martin and how you unfortunately were not able to recover from it. I thank my lucky star I had a full backup on another disk when I expereinced the same thing. It did take lots of time restoring all the data from one disk to the other but that was certainly better than not having any data to restore...


    Let's hope what we experienced can be used as a fundament to improve the product in this regard in future versions and until then the best bet would be to never ever use the GUI inside Windows to initiate a system restore but instead stick to always using bootable media instead where you are actually required to pick the disk yourself where you want the system image to be restored.

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