Worrying problems during image restore

[FOrmula400]

I am Using Paragon Hard Disk Manager 2012 WINPE edition from DVD.

I am trying to restore a backup archive (made 2 days ago) containing 2 partitions:
a programs partition (F drive) - backup size around 8 GB
and a system (Windows 7 64 bit) partition (C drive) around 55 GB.
Total backup time was around 45 minutes.
The backup was made using no encryption and normal compression.

The restore (currently ongoing) was in two parts.
Part 1 (the 8GB partition) took 40 minutes and indicated 'succeeded' after 40 minutes.
Part 2 has been going for 1 hour and 10 minutes and is indicating 'overall progress 57%' It showed 50% at the end of the first (8GB) partition. It says there are 7 hours to go!!

When I selected the 'show progress messages' I noticed that during the first partition restore there are several 100s maybe thousands of messages along the lines:

'processing of file x has failed with error "access to a file or folder is denied" '. The vast majority of these errors refer to Adobe Acrobat 9.

I now see similar error messages whilst the program is laboriously restoring my C drive partition. Various files are having the problem - as I watch some winsx files are suffering.

So, some questions:

Does the time being taken for the restore seem excessive?

Why am I getting these error messages? I thought that an image backup and restore didn't care what the files are - I thought it just duplicated bytes of data.

When I set the restore going one of the options I had to select was what to do with data that already existed at the destination - I said to overwrite.

It must be about a year since I last did a restore with Paragon and don't remember these 'file error' probleme and also remember the restore time not being much longer than the backup time. This is clearly not the case here. I also recall formatting the destination partitions before the program started doing the restore.

Have I somehow managed to select a file restore from my backup image rather than a partition restore? Is that possible?

The restore is now indicating 'overall progress 60%' after a total time of 2 hours 25 minutes with 7 hours remaining.

I do hope someone can help. I am concerned that my restore is in the process of very slowly wrecking my windows installation rather than returning it to a known state.

My PC is a Dell SXPS 1340 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo 7200 rpm hard drive. Backup drive is Toshiba USB 1 TB disk.

Thank you

Geoff Minshull

[Robin A.]

With HDM you can do either sector-based backups (images) or file-based backups. It is not clear to me what kind of backups you created. Processing file-based backups can be much slower than processing sector-based backups.

[FOrmula400]

Thanks for your reply Robin.

The contents of the archive contain several files with names starting with img_. There are .pbf and .pfm files. I am sure they are image files.

After more than 3 hours I decide to cancel the operation. Bad mistake. an hour and a half later the operation had still not cancelled. I had to stop the operation by disconnecting the external disk then I could exit Paragon WINPE.

After that, not surprisingly, Windows would not start, so I did a Windows repair. Two minutes ago Windows started successfully. Will now assess what damage may have been done.

I still don't believe it can take 8 or more hours to restore a partition which was backed up in 40 minutes. I must be doing something wrong, but what.

I will take the steps for a restore, but not commit, using both the WINPE and regular Windows versions and see if I can figure it out. It wasn't this difficult a year ago!!

[FOrmula400]

As I suspected, it turned out to be an error on my part.
When selecting the archive to restore from, I found the archive which contained the 2 partitions (C and E) that I wanted to restore. I didn't notice the instruction on the page to select one partition to restore. I wanted to restore 2 partitions so I selected them by clicking on each partition and ticking the check box. If you do that, the program appears to switche to file restore mode. If you select just one partition by clicking on it so that the check box does not appear it stays in partition restore mode. You are then taken through further steps applicable to partition restoring, rather than file restoring.

So I selected my Programs partition (8GB) and it restored in 3 and a half minutes.

I then selected my System partition (55GB) and it restored in 20 minutes.

I rebooted and the laptop performed just as it had when the image backup was made.

So this has been a reminder to me to read all the words on the page when making choices.

Geoff