AOMEI Backuper System Restore gone Amuck
I tried to restore a System Backup with AOEMI Backupper Standard and it made an absolute mess of things.
I am running the 64bit flavor of Windows 10 and have three hard drives.:
Drive 0 (512 GB) is the system drive and is split into two partitions. Partition 1 (C:) contains the operating system and the bulk of my installed programs. Partition 2 (D:) contains games and a Temp folder that is used when I want to fast access to files (Drive 0 is significantly faster than the other drives.
Drive 1 (256 GB) is for data and contains a single partition (E:). It contains several years worth of personal data and my Dropbox folder. Most of my Windows special folders (My Documents, Favorites, Contactrs, etc) are redirected to folders within the Dropbox folder along with many of the Application data/settings folders from the user AppData folder.
Drive 2 (256 GB) is a temporary cache drive with a single partition (F:) used for working with video and audio projects.
I had previously created a standard System Image in Backupper and it captured Partition 1 from Drive 0 along with two related hidden partitions, just as I'd expect. This was stored on a NAS on the same network as the computer. When I decided to restore this image, I copied it to the Temp folder on Partition 2 of Drive 0. This is the how I've been handing System backups and restores for years with Acronis True Image with the above drive setup.
When I started the restore, I used the Path option to find and select the Image file in the Temp folder mentioned above. Backupper prompted me that this particular backup was a System Image and asked if I'd like to do a System Restore; the answer to that seemed pretty obvious! There was a toggle to "Restore system to other location", but I wanted to restore this image to the original drive, so I left that alone. The operation summary looked perfectly normal, so I proceeded with the restore.
Upon completion of the restore and a boot back up into Windows, Dropbox complained that it could not find the dropbox folder on Drive E:. Ruh roh! I opened up explorer and noticed that the label for Drive E: was no longer "Data", but was "System" instead and it was now a mirror image of the C: System drive; the Dropbox folder and other data folders were nowhere to be seen. Backupper had restored the system image to Drive 1, completely wiping all of my data!
I quickly reformatted the Data drive and recreated the Dropbox folder, expecting Dropbox to start syncing all of the files from the cloud to the local drive, but the stupid thing decided to Sync the new empty local folder TO the cloud, thus deleting all of the files and folders in the cloud. ::sigh:: I do also have backups on the previously mentioned NAS, but what a freakin mess.
After a few hours, I successfully restore most of my data and take a look at Backupper again. I thought that I might have missed a step to select the backup location but can find no such step. Why would it default a system restore to a completely separate drive!?
I checked out the "Restore system to other location" and decided to give that a try by manually selecting the system partition as the location (Partition 1 of Drive 0). It seemed like an unecessary step, but if that's all I have to in order to restore a system backup, it's not a big deal at all.
Upon completion of the second restore and a boot back up into Windows, Dropbox complained that it could not find the dropbox folder on Drive E: ... again. Drive 0 was overwritten... again. data files wiped... again.
WTF!? Is there no way to restore a system image to the drive that it was created from? Why is it overwriting a completely unrelated drive? There's absolutely no indication during the initial restore steps that Drive 1 is the target. If I didn't have redundant backups, this would have been an absolute disaster.
Comments
I just did a test backup and restore of an system image created in Acronis True Image using the same drive configuration detailed in my previous post and it worked flawlessly. This doesn't bode well for Aomeitech Backupper.
I was just able to use Backupper to restore the system image mentioned in my first post, but in order to do so, I had to disable the other drives in the bios first. If I leave the other drives enabled, Backupper will restore system image to the wrong drive.
There REALLY needs to be more information in the summary screen before the restore process starts. There's currently no information regarding the target drive; users have to hope that the restoration is going to the correct drive. Unfortunately, it doesn't always seem to go to the correct drive...
thanks for the very valuable information. I recall however that it asks for the partition where to restore (but cannot try now to verify on one of my virtual machines).
Hi Peter,
Mine certainly doesn't ask for the target location, at least not when restoring a System Image, tho I bet it WILL ask for a target during the restoration of a non-system image.
There's a "[ ] Restore system to other location" toggle on the second page of the process, but when I tried to use that option during the second restore attempt, it ended up being completely ignored.
The summary page gives no indication at all as to what drive the image will ultimately be restored to:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/12472870/Media/Images/Screenshots/backupper.jpg
Actually, looking at that Summary Page, it DOES seem to indicate the target drive, at least indirectly. The right-hand column appears to be the CURRENT partition setup; I had originally assumed that the right-hand column simply showed what it'd look like once complete. So in that screenshot, it's indirectly indicating that Drive 0 is the target, because the partitions shown in the right-hand column are currently on Drive 0. However, this is NOT what actually happens. When I click the Start Restore button, the computer will reboot and restore the image to Drive 1.