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Backupper 3 trashed my PC

edited July 2015 in AOMEI Products Support

I've been using AOMEI Backupper and PA for a couple of years, and loved them before now.  Now, I hate them.

I downloaded Backupper 3 (free version) and ran the install.  It first asked me if I wanted to delete the old Backupper, so I said yes, and it did that and stopped.  So I started the install again, and it stopped in the middle of the install, saying it couldn't copy some dll.  No big deal, I thought, I'll reboot and try again.  But I couldn't reboot - boot error.  I booted my Windows DVD and tried to repair it --- it couldn't repair it.  I attached another drive and booted from that, and found that my old C drive was gone -- the other partitions on the same physical hard drive were still there, but the 100GB C drive was gone, and in its place was the 128MB Windows EFI partition or whatever, which had been hidden before.

Not a complete disaster, because I had a recent backup image, and I was about to install Windows 10 anyway.  I installed Win10 on a new drive, and taking complete leave of my senses, I installed Backupper 3 on it.  That went without incident.  Then I made a backup of the new Win10 boot partition, to restore to where my old C drive was.  The backup said it couldn't proceed because VSS wasn't started (it was, I checked before I started the backup), but it proceeded anyway, and reported success.  There was just 14GB of data, since it was a new Win10 install, and I had deleted the Windows.old folder before I made the backup.


Then I restored the Win10 image I just made to my old C drive that had been trashed by the Backupper install earlier.  It reported success, but suddenly a 1.5TB partition on the same drive was gone.  Just gone.  I looked in PA, and it said the space was unallocated.  I had over a terabyte of very important programs and files on that drive.  Looks like they are gone forever.


Stay away from this product.  It will F you up.

Comments

  • After a crash course in decoding GPT partition tables, I think I see what happened.  Windows 10 has the usual EFI partition of about 128MB before the C drive, but it also has a WRE partition of about 450MB after the C drive.  Backupper copied all three, and instead of taking the space for the 450 MB partition out of the 45GB available to it from the free space at the front of the drive (I deleted the old boot partition before the restore), it chose to take that 450MB from the front of the next partition after the free space, EVEN THOUGH IT WAS CLEARLY MARKED AS AN ACTIVE PRIMARY PARTITION.   So it completely overwrote the volume header.  Recreating the partition won't do any good.  And the partiton was encypted with TrueCrypt, so there aren't any tools to find pieces of files.  The only way to find them is with the TrueCrypt header after the correct password is entered, and the TrueCrypt header is gone.  So the1.5 TB of data is irretrievably gone.


    DAMN YOU TO HELL!!!

  • You did not back up the header? Or backup that partition?


    Another detail you kept programs, documents, etc. In the same unit where you used the OS?

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