What Do I Use to Restore?

Hello all. I am trying to restore my computer using the free Paragon Backup and Recovery 2012 program.

In my external hard drive I have two back ups that were made around the same time, and I am trying to restore from the larger more recent backup.

When I am in the Paragon Restore wizard, the archive for this larger backup does not show up. I then switched to file view and I entered the correct folder where the PBFs and pfm files are at.

My question is, which file do I choose to restore from? The PBF or the pfm? Or what about the .p000?

Should I just restore from the largest .p000 (262gb) or the PBF (117kb)?

Thanks!

 

A little speculation on my part which means I should look in the manual:

Try the .PBF. If you have more than one .PBF do the top level one which is named from the name of the archive when you made the backup. I think it contains the information for the whole archive. The .PBF that have things like img_0.... and img_1... at the front of the filename appear to be for the individual partitions backed up.

The program has enough intelligence to know what you want to do it or to indicate it isn't going to work if the wrong file is selected.

 

I believe the same question came up in another thread and you are correct.

 

Thanks! It worked, and the PBF has all the files I want.

This might be a dumb question but can I restore Windows system files? I want to restore my computer to a point BEFORE I got this ugly virus thing.

Can I restore while my computer is on (as in, will it encounter an error when trying to overwrite Windows files) or do I have to do something else? It's stuck at 15 hours 58 minutes remaining (USB2 connection).

Thanks!

 

If you are using a Linux recovery disk, are restoring from an external USB 2 disk, and the size of the image is 260 GB, you should expect a long time for the restore process to finish.

The remaining time reported by the program can be wrong. Usually these estimates are not very accurate in Paragon programs.

It is possible to use better practices in image management to avoid these lengthly processes.

 

You can't just restore system files with Paragon. You can use the Windows system restore for that providing you have a restore point created at the time you want.

EDIT: Rethinking this, one can pull files from an archive but I know this won't work from Windows as you have to Ownership of files/folders. I don't remember if I tried this from the WinPE enviroment but I think that it should work.

 

To get a very rough estimate of how long it will take, I use an estimate of 1 minute per GB of normally compressed archive. If yours is 260GB then my estimate is about 4 hours. The real speed depends on your processing power, what type of device the archive is stored on and in the case of the Linux recovery disk, how well the Linux implementation and its drivers work with your hardware.

Restoring an image is a better mechanism than a Restore Point because there is more certaintly about the integrity of the resulting system.

Robin is quite correct about setting your system up for the most effective use of images.

My method is to only have the OS and applications on my C drive. All my important data files are kept elsewhere which for the purposes of imaging the C drive quickly can be another partition on the same physical drive. This way the typical used space is around 30GB depending on how many large applications you have installed.

The much smaller size makes imaging a lot faster so you will be more inclined to do it manually if you are going to test some software or make uncertain configuration changes. Sort of an ultimate restore point.

If you suspect any problems with your PC it is easy to blow away the C drive and restore a previous image without having to worry about losing your important data files.

Another advantage is that a smaller image has less chance of running into integrity issues making it unuseable.

 

Thanks for all the feedback!

Is there a way in Paragon to make a system image of JUST the important OS files and other applications/files?

Another question: if I were to "blow away" my C drive, how would that be done? Just reformat the C drive and boot up a system image or something?

It's just something I'd like to know

 

I don't think there is a way of automatically extracting only the OS and applications although Paragon sells a SSD migration tool that I think does this so you can get your system on the typically much smaller SSD drive. I thought it might be included in say Backup and Recovery or HD Manager but I don't see it.

I've never done this but it should work:

You could move all of your obvious data files such as the ones listed below off the drive using Windows Explorer onto a USB drive. This would leave you with the OS and applications. Make an image and restore it to the drive. Paragon will let you make the restored partition smaller than the original. You can then use Windows Disk Management or any other partitioning tool (probably within Paragon as well) to partition the now unallocated space to another logical drive for your data.

A second method:

Although I've never used it, Paragon in the backup wizard does allow file exclusions so if your C drive contains a lot of MP3, VOB, MPEG, JPG and other real obvious data files you could make an image excluding them which should be OK. Excluding files that could be part of your applications or OS such as .dat would be a problem.

After you make the image with the excluded files you can then restore it and see if it works.

The best way to test either of these methods would be to restore to a spare HD and leave your original intact.

Whatever you do make sure all your important data files are well backed up. You can always reinstall the OS and apps but you data files may not be available anywwere else at any cost!

To blow away a disk you only need to restore an image to the partition or partitions. Formatting is a waste of time since the format information is included in the image so you would just overwrite your format effort.

 

Wow thanks for all the great help and insight!