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  • eazyBackup Knowledge Base
  • Guides
    • Getting Started Guide
    • Creating Protected Items
    • How to Backup Windows Network Shares and UNC Paths
    • How to Restore Files and Folders
    • Disk Image Backup Guide
    • Disk Image Backup Restore Guide
    • How to backup to a local storage vault (External or Internal Hard Drive)
    • Microsoft 365 Cloud Backup Guide
    • Microsoft 365 Cloud Backup Restore
    • Seed Load Walkthrough
    • eazyBackup Control Panel
    • Delete backup snapshots to reduce Storage Vault size
    • Kroll Pharmacy Management Database Backup
    • How to Backup Dentrix Database to the Cloud
    • How to Backup Patterson Eaglesoft Dental Software
    • Hyper-V Virtual Machine Backup Walkthrough
    • Storage Vault Usage Report
    • Linux Installation Guide (Debian, Ubuntu)
    • Two-Factor Authentication for Backup Accounts
    • Securing your Backup against Ransomware
    • How to move a backup to a new computer
  • Documentation
    • Add and Rename Storage Vaults
    • Available Storage Locations
    • How to Run Manual Backup
    • Backing up Windows Network Shares and UNC Paths
    • Browse Job History
    • Cancel a Running Backup Job
    • Commands
    • Backup Report Email Address
    • Custom Email Reports
    • Deleting a Protected Item
    • Disk Image Backup
    • eazyBackup Software Structure
    • Error “Access to the cloud file is denied” backing up OneDrive
    • Retention Concept
    • Confirm EFS keys are Exported (Windows EFS)
    • Data Encryption – Understanding Our AES-256 Encryption & Key Management
    • eazyBackup Chunking Overview
    • eazyBackup Chunking and Deduplication
    • Storage Vaults
    • Re-scan Unchanged Files
    • Required URLs and Ports for eazyBackup
    • Setting up a New Backup Account (license) in My Dashboard
    • Before and After Commands
    • eazyBackup Hotfix Install
    • Default File / Folder Exclusions From Backup
    • Restore from Deleted Protected Item
    • Random Job Delay – Protected Item Schedule
    • Copy a Protected Item Configuration to New Device
    • Manage Vaults on Protected Items – Add/Remove/Update
    • How to Remove a Registered Device
    • Retention Configuration and Cleanup
    • macOS Installation
    • Windows Installation
    • Linux (Other Distribution)
    • Linux (Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS)
    • Linux NAS (Synology, QNAP)
    • “Application-Aware Writer” Backups
    • “Microsoft Exchange Server” Backup
    • “Microsoft Hyper-V” Backup
    • “Microsoft SQL Server” Backup
    • “MySQL” Backup
    • “Program Output” items
    • “Windows Server System State” Backup
    • “Windows System Backup”
    • Silent installation for RMM (Windows advanced)
    • Microsoft 365 Backup
    • VMware vSphere Backup
  • Troubleshooting
    • Cannot proceed – another task needs to finish using the Storage Vault first
    • Change of hardware causes registration dialog to appear
    • Diagnosing Slow Backup Jobs
    • Error “EFS-encrypted files may be unusable once restored”
    • Error “Media is write protected” backing up OneDrive with VSS
    • Error “operation not permitted” macOS
    • Error “The target path ‘X:\WindowsImageBackup’ already exists – please safely remove this direct...
    • Error backing up item exit status 3 Couldn’t create virtual device set: Unknown error 0x80770005
    • Found packs in index but not appearing on disk. Reindex needed
    • Inactive / Abandoned “Running” Jobs
    • Lost connection to local service
    • Lstat: CreateFile \\?\UNC\ backup: Access is denied.
    • Mount path conflict: Can’t mount path inside real directory
    • OneDrive error “The tag present in the reparse point buffer is invalid”
    • Out of memory
    • Shared Memory Provider: Could not open a connection to SQL Server
    • VSS Error: Device is not ready
    • VSS Error: Couldn’t take snapshot. The shadow copy provider had an unexpected error while trying ...
    • Windows Backup encountered an error when writing data to the backup target.
    • Error “Access is denied” when backing up files and folders on Windows
    • Error “local error: tls: record overflow”
    • Microsoft SQL Server backup encountered a VDI error
    • Network Connectivity Errors
    • How to Locate All EFS Encrypted Files for Windows 10 and Server
    • Couldn’t save folder details: fs.TempFile: Access is denied
    • Couldn’t save Office 365 data for account – The requested user is invalid
    • WARNING Data error (cyclic redundancy check) occurred inside byte range
    • Set-Disk : Access Denied During Disk Image Backup
    • The System State encountered a problem: exit status 0xfffffffc
    • Runtime: VirtualAlloc of xx bytes failed with errno=1455 fatal error: out of memory
    • Disk Image Backup – Checking if device is ready: DeviceIoControl: The request could not be performed
    • Checking if device xx is ready: DeviceIoControl: The request failed due to a fatal device hardware..
    • x509 Certificate has expired or is not yet valid
    • Couldn’t load tree/xyz for subdirectory: tree/xyz not present in any index
    • Optimizing snapshot: not present in any index
    • Reading subdirectories of – Open: /Files/Documents/ operation not permitted
    • file truncated (expected xxxx bytes, got 0)
    • WARNING: Node (xxxx) filename.ext’ collision at position xxxx
    • How to easily find disks with read / write errors in Windows
    • Multiple connections to a server or shared resource error
    • Application failed to start because no Qt platform plugin could be initialized
    • OneDrive The cloud operation is not supported on a read-only volume
    • Hyper-V Error: Backing up exit status 1 (skipping)
  • FAQs
    • Account Devices and Billing
    • How can I restore my files to a new computer?
    • How to reset a backup account password
    • Can’t login to eazyBackup – Login information doesn’t work
    • Cloud Storage and Online Backup Service for Protected Health Information
    • How to cancel your eazyBackup subscription
  • eazyBackup Rebranding
    • Backup Client and Control Panel Branding
    • White Label Email Configuration
  • e3 Object Storage
    • e3 Object Storage Pricing FAQs
    • Manage Billing
    • Delete Account
    • How to configure QNAP Hybrid Backup Sync to S3 Compatible Object Storage
    • How to Use Arq Backup with eazyBackup e3 Object Storage
    • How to use Synology Hyper Backup with eazyBackup e3 Object Storage
    • How to use Duplicati with eazyBackup e3 Object Storage
    • How to use rclone with eazyBackup e3 S3 Compatible Object Storage
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On this page
  • Restoring (Data drive)
  • Restoring (Bootable Operating System)
  • Using Windows Recovery
  • Alternative ways of backing up Windows System Backup

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  1. Documentation

“Windows System Backup”

eazyBackup integrates with Windows System Backup to support backing up entire system volumes as .vhd / .vhdx files using the wbadmin technology.

Choose volumes to back up, and/or choose "all critical volumes".

  • You can choose a volume by its drive letter (e.g. C:\), or by a qualified Windows volume reference for volumes without a drive letter (see the output of fsutil volume list).

A local path must be used for spooling temporary data. Spooled temporary data will be removed once the backup job completes. The selected spool path

  • must be a bare root drive, and

  • must not be included as one of the selected volumes, and

  • must appear to Windows as fixed, not removable - regardless of whether it is physically an internal or external drive

    • You can work around this issue for a removable drive by sharing a folder on the drive, and setting its UNC path as the spool directory

Restoring (Data drive)

Once you restore the .vhd file with eazyBackup, it can be mounted in Windows, or it can be browsed (e.g. in 7-Zip), or it can be attached to a virtual machine, or it can be written out to a physical volume. This will allow you to access and extract individual files and folders within the backup.

Restoring (Bootable Operating System)

If you included the OS drive in the backup, it is possible to restore the OS to a bootable state, provided some additional conditions are met:

The following method of restoring the OS requires that you included the "System Reserved" partition in the backup job; either by manually including the volume, or by choosing "All Critical Volumes" in the volume selection.

If you do not include the "System Reserved" partition in the backup job, the resulting .vhd / .vhdx is a data-only file. In that situation you may need to manually recreate an NTLDR bootloader (using the bootsect and bcdedit commands) before the machine can be booted.

If you are backing up a machine that booted via EFI, you may also need to backup and restore the EFI System Partition (ESP).

Note that Windows OS installations do specialize themselves for the current hardware, and backup images are not automatically pre-prepared for hardware independence. An operating system image may only boot on identical- or highly-similar hardware. This issue originates from the wbadmin "Windows System Backup" technology and is not specific to eazyBackup's implementation. You may find more information online.

Using Windows Recovery

Once you restore the .vhd / .vhdx file(s) with eazyBackup, you can boot into either Windows Recovery or the Windows install media, and choose the "System Image Recovery" option.

It may be mandatory to keep the files in the WindowsImageBackup subdirectory on the root drive, in order for the "System Image Recovery" GUI to find the files. "System Image Recovery" is only able to restore a system image if the backup included the "System Reserved" partition.

  • In this dialog, you can click the "Select a system image" option to find the .vhd / .vhdx file, so that Windows can write it back to your physical disk.

  • More information is available online, including a visual walkthrough:

  • Later versions of the Windows install media are able to recover .vhd files of older versions of Windows, and may have better driver support. For instance, if you experience problems recovering a .vhd file using the Server 2008 install media, consider trying with install media from a newer version of windows.

Using wbadmin

You can use the wbadmin start recovery or wbadmin start sysrecovery commands to restore the OS without using the Windows "System Image Recovery" GUI.

Using qemu-img

The .vhd file can be manually written out to a physical volume using qemu-img (e.g. qemu-img convert -f vpc image.vhd /dev/sda) or any similar tool.

Using the hypervisor

The .vhd file can be attached to a virtual machine and booted as-is.

Alternative ways of backing up Windows System Backup

Note that because wbadmin is used, spool space is required. It may be preferable to use the "Files and Folders" backup type instead, that does not require spool space. However, backing up a Windows OS installation in this way does not result in a bootable image.


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Last updated 11 months ago

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Windows 10 / Server 2016:

via answers.microsoft.com
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