Restore changed disk format of target drive

midniteoil

Greetings,

I have an internal SSD that unfortunately came formatted with exFAT. So I backed the entire drive up to a NAS using the AOMEI Backupper.

I then reformatted the SSD to NTFS and restored the backup. Imagine my disappointment to discover that AOMEI changed the format of the SSD back to exFAT.

Is it possible to restore the backup without changing the format of the destination drive?

aiArtisan

Hi Mid, thank you for your question. I understand you want the files on this disk, but with a different file system. To do that, please create a folder on another disk, such as a NAS, and manually copy all of the files to the folder on the different disk, then on the original disk, format the disk with NTFS, or another file system that you want. Then copy the files back manually. If these files are extremely important, or are business files, then please in addition to copying the files manually to the other disk/NAS, also create a Backupper disk image .ADI and put it on a 3rd disk, just in case.

Could you please help us understand what your goal is with the original disk? Are you merely storing files there? or are you running programs or doing something more advanced with it? Different file systems have different pros and cons, there is no perfect one, I have used dozens of them.

FAT32 - Compatibility

NTFS - Safety, Features

ExFat - Performance

ExFat is the most modern of the 3, and can handle large disks, files, partitions, but it is only meant for data, not a system, such as Windows. Exfat cannot be resized, shrunk, grown. ExFat does not have permissions for each file, so it is less safe, but the performance is better, and simpler to use.

aiArtisan

Could you please also confirm the original disk is a GPT partition table? GPT is recommended for almost all disks today.

admin

@Midniteoil, Disk/Partition Backup is sector level backup. It will restore the original format. Maybe you can try to use File Backup to back up files/folders of the partition, and then create new partition and do file restore.

midniteoil

Thanks for the replies. How can I tell if it's a GPT partition table? I don't see that info under Disk Management. There is one, "Primary" partition. 

I wanted to reformat it as NTFS because I am doing multiplayer game development in Unity and I want to be able to use ParellSync to run multiple instances. ParrelSync uses symlinks which exFAT does not support. 

However, if exFAT is more performant that is probably more important to me than being able to use ParrelSync. 

aiArtisan

ExFat performs better in specific situations, not in all cases. NTFS requires user level permissions for each file, sometimes that can slow you down, whereas ExFat does not require user level permissions for files, so it is faster in that example. It should always perform at least as good as NTFS, but not always better. Try it out, see if it works better for you. If you need NTFS for system features, such as symlinks, then perhaps that is better for you.