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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
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    • Linux (Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS)
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    • “Application-Aware Writer” Backups
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    • “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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  1. Guides

Disk Image Backup Restore Guide

PreviousDisk Image Backup GuideNextHow to backup to a local storage vault (External or Internal Hard Drive)

Last updated 11 months ago

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Disk Image backup protects a complete disk or individual partitions and allows you to restore the backup to bare metal in the event of a disk failure.

Boot your Workstation / Server with the eazyBackup and restore disks or partitions without requiring temporary spool space.

The Disk Image can be restored to dissimilar hardware if needed.

Disk Image Backups can be performed to multiple destinations, such as a local storage device in addition to cloud storage. Having a local, onsite backup will reduce the time needed restore large backups and offers additional redundancy.

Disk Image Backup

The demo video shows how a typical Windows PC can be backed up using the Disk Image Protected Item type

Disk Image Restore

The demo video below shows the restore process using the USB bootable recovery media. The system is booted from the USB media and the system disk is restored directly from cloud storage.

Restore options

The Restore wizard inside eazyBackup allows restoring of backed-up disks and partitions directly to physical disks and partitions, without requiring temporary spool space. Alternatively, it can be restored as virtual disk files.

eazyBackup stores the Disk Image files in VMDK format, from which single files can be extracted.

Restore to physical device(s)

In order to restore to physical hardware, the target disk or partition should be unmounted (not in use). eazyBackup may be able to do this automatically from within the currently booted OS if no programs are using the target drive (e.g. for a non-boot drive).

  • If the goal is to restore to the boot drive, first, reboot the PC into a recovery environment.

  • When restoring a smaller partition into a larger one, eazyBackup will automatically extend the restored filesystem to the fill the target partition. eazyBackup does not support restoring a large backed-up partition into a smaller physical partition. The partition must be shrunk using the OS’s partition manager prior to performing the backup.

Restore from Windows boot environment

  1. Select a backed-up disk or partition to restore, from the left-hand column

  2. Select a target disk or partition to write to, from the right-hand column

  3. Click the Add to restore queue button

  4. Repeat steps 1-3 as necessary for other disks and partitions

  5. Click the Restore button to begin the restore job

The Edit function can be used to re-partition the local drives using Windows Disk Management. After doing so, the Refresh function may be used to refresh the view of the local disks and partitions able to be selected for restore.

Restore from Linux boot environment

Steps to restore an entire disk, without spooling:

  1. Restore just the disk.vmdk file (without the data extents), and open it in a text editor in order to read the partition sizes.

  2. Recreate partitions to the exact target size

  3. Single partitions can be restored without any local spool disk, using the "Program Output" restore option, and selecting only a single partition file for restore: dd of=/dev/sdx1 bs=8M

Restore Disk Image as virtual disk files

There is one plain text VMDK descriptor file containing metadata about the whole drive, plus separate raw image files for each partition’s extent on the disk. The plain text file is labelled disk.vmdk by default.

Partitions of the disk that were not selected for backup are represented as zero extents in the VMDK descriptor file. The effect of this is that the restored disk image will appear to have the full disk size, even if only a small amount of partitions inside it were selected. However, the zero extents will be compressed inside the Storage Vault.

The VMDK disk images may be restored, then, optionally, do one of the following:

  • Extract single files from them, or

  • Recover to a local virtual machine, or

  • Recover to a cloud server

Restore files and folders from Disk Image

This feature allows a customer to browse the filesystem in a Disk Image backup and restore files and/or folders without downloading the whole VMDK disk image in advance. Currently this feature is supported for the NTFS.

VMware virtual disk​

Starting from version 23.9.5, there's a new feature for disk image backup. Now, you can restore your disk image backup as a virtual disk that works with VMware. This means you can use it in VMware without needing to change anything.

Create USB Recovery Media

The eazyBackup app supports the creation of USB Recovery Media from the wizard on the Settings screen.

This allows a user to boot from the USB device, type-in the username and password for the backup account, and make a full restoration from backup onto the drive(s) of the connected PC. In this fashion, bare-metal restorations can be achieved.

The following options are available:

  • WinRE

  • Windows To Go

WinRE

Selecting this option allows the creation of a minimal USB Recovery Media based on the Windows Recovery Environment.

Windows To Go

Selecting this option allows the creation of a full Windows boot environment. this method

Other boot environment

A recovery environment may also be created in other ways. Both Windows or Linux can be used as a suitable recovery environment. Some possible methods include:

  • creating a Linux bootable USB drive, or

  • using recovery media from your PC OEM vendor (e.g. Lenovo / Dell / HP)

In these cases, the eazyBackup app will need to be launched manually, once booted into the recovery environment.


using a third-party tool like to create a Windows-To-Go drive, or

Rufus
eazyBackup
USB recovery media