Three practical steps to make sure the safety net will work.
Yeah, I hear those heartbreaking stories all the time, and they are indeed one reason I talk so much about backing up.
Your concerns about backups are common, as is the desire to test.
Let’s review how you can gain some confidence that your backup will be successful when you need it.
Testing backups
- A full restore is the ultimate test, but it’s impractical to carry out.
- Test the rescue media by booting from it and preparing for a restore, but don’t start it.
- Test a backup image by restoring individual files from it.
- Test a backup image by viewing its contents and making sure all expected files are present.
- You can perform a complete test by replacing the hard drive and restoring an image.
A full restore is the ultimate test
The ultimate way to test backups, of course, is exactly what you ended up doing: performing a full restore of an image backup.
A full restore is the most important backup to have work because it can save you from almost any problem. Malware infection? Restore to an image created before the infection, and it’s gone. Disk failure? Replace the drive, restore the most recent image, and you’re up and working again.
The problem with testing backups is that a full restore is risky.
By definition, a full restore is a destructive operation. It erases what’s currently on the hard drive and replaces it with the contents of the backup image. If the restore fails partway through, you’re worse off than when you began. You found out your backup didn’t work, but you trashed what was on the hard drive in the process.
The very backup you took to be able to fix the failure is the restore your test just discovered doesn’t work!
Here’s my approach to testing backups.
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Related
Creating an EaseUS Todo Emergency Disk
Before you can restore a backup image created using EaseUS Todo, you'll need an emergency disk.#29683
1. Use the rescue media, prepare for a restore, and stop
Create the rescue media — sometimes called an emergency disk — from your backup program. This is the CD, DVD, or USB stick you would boot from to perform that full restore. Then boot from it.
Getting this to work is important because booting from something other than your hard drive can be complicated these days.
Once the software from the rescue media is running, make sure it can see the drive that contains your backup images.
Then follow the steps to do an image restore, stopping before the restore begins. This verifies that your recovery disk works and the backup program can access everything needed to perform the restore.
That’s about as far as you can go without performing the restore, but it’s tested quite a bit.
2. Extract files
Most backup programs allow you to extract individual files from your full system backup image. Doing so is another way to test backups.
I recommend restoring a single file.
Exactly how to do this depends on the backup program you’re running, but the scenario is the same: delete or rename an unimportant file on your hard disk and go through the steps for your backup program to restore the file from a backup.
You shouldn’t need to boot from the rescue media. Extracting a file is something you should be able to do by running the backup software and using it to extract individual files from wherever your backups are stored.
If you succeed, great! You now have confidence that the files contained in that backup image can be restored in the event of a disaster.
If you fail, however, you know you need to revisit how you’re backing up.
3. Check the image
There’s one final test to make sure the files you think are in your backup are in fact in your backup.
For example, in my Macrium Reflect course, I outline how to mount a backup image as a virtual hard drive. (You can do this with other backup programs as well.) You can then examine the contents of the image to make sure it contains what you expect.
Poke around in the backed-up Windows folders to make sure all of Windows is there. Browse through the folders that contain your data to ensure the same. Look around inside that image to ensure it has what you might need should the worst happen.
There is no 100% guarantee that your backup will work when you need it, but these tests give you confidence that issues that often get in the way of an effective backup won’t get in the way for you.
Bonus: A complete test, done safely
There’s one more way to test backups. It involves more work and some additional cost, but it’ll prove beyond a doubt that your backups work.
- Buy a new hard drive.
- Replace the hard drive in your machine with the new hard drive.
- Restore an image to the new hard drive.
- Reboot.
If this works, you can leave the new hard drive in your machine and keep the old as a spare.
If it fails, just put the old hard drive back in your machine and move on to diagnose how and why your backup failed.
Do this
Above all, back up.
Then take a little time to test it as outlined above. Not only will it give you a little more confidence that things will be there when you need them, but if something does fail along the way, you’ll have the opportunity to fix it before disaster strikes.
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Regarding the article’s method #2 (Extract files) for testing a disk image backup, I did this a couple of times with Macrium Reflect. Actually, they weren’t a test. I was trying to restore deleted folders in Windows XP I thought I no longer needed. Each time, I ran into the same problem. While in the administrator-capable user account, I browsed toward the desired folder in the disk image (G:\Documents and Settings\User Name\Desktop\folder). When I got to the User Name part, I wasn’t allowed to open it because Windows said: “You don’t currently have permission to access this folder.” What?!
I don’t remember exactly how I got around this to access the desired folder. Later, I discovered Leo has an article that deals with this problem. Anyway, I just wanted to mention this to alert other readers to this potential issue. Because when you are trying to recover a lost file or folder from a disk image, you are probably in a mild state of panic already. And an error message dealing with permission is the last thing you want to see.
Leo, I do have a couple of questions:
1) Does this permission issue have anything to do with the fact that the disk image is saved on an “external” hard drive?
2) Any idea as to what causes this particular permission issue?
3) Is there anything users can do ahead of time to try to avoid this issue?
Thanks.
Good point. Here is a link to the article Yeppers is referring to:
How Do I Gain Access to Files Windows Says I Don’t Have Permission to Access?
1) I don’t believe so.
2) your current credentials don’t match the credentials of the file in the backup. Running administrator-capable account isn’t the same as acually running AS administrator.
3) I’d either run reflect as administrator, or failing that even login to the real administrator account
To be clear, I’m surprised you weren’t given an option to get permission right then and there.
If all you wanted was to retrieve your own data files or folders, you should have never had to look at Macrium. See what Hans said (May 27, 2014) and Leo endorsed. Keep it simple.
Here’s what I did. My main worry, besides whether or not the image was any good, was would I be able to actually do a restore, as I had only recently tried Reflect. Well, coincidentally, I had an old Dell laptop that had seen better days. It was on my discard pile. So, before removing its HD, I tried a few things: including doing a BU/Restore. It worked so perfectly. My confidence went from 10% to 95%. Years later, I did have a s-ware crash and eventually I did have to restore from B/U. No problem. So…good use for old computer!
Mel
I recently had to buy a new laptop as the old one (a reburbished Lenovo T430 running Win 7 Pro) was shewing signs of wear.
Because I don’t like the look and feel of Win 10, I installed a Win 7 Pro lookalike. However, following my normal routine, I started a backup of the new disk complete with System Image. It went to 97% complete and stuck there for two days. I eventually deleted the saved partial system image and then backed up WITHOUT the image. That works and each day, at the scheduled time, it backs up.
I seperately told backup to create a System Image and again, it stuck at 97%. I stopped the backup and have left it so.
Is this a known problem?
That shouldn’t happen. It can be caused by a defective drive. Running chkdsk.exe /r on the drive can help. It can also be a program error. You might also try running a different backup program. Leo recommends either EaseUS Todo or Macrium Reflect.
What backup tool did you use?
I back up 2 ways. once with an image backup program ( Macrium Reflect), and also I backup the files and folders with a synchronize program (Goodsync). That way if Macrium fails, I at least don’t loose anything but time it takes to reinstall Windows, and copy the files and folders back to c drive.
Good idea. I use OneDrive for that to keep them stored on Microsoft servers. Dropbox, Google Drive and others are just as good. I use OneDrive as it is included in my Office 365 subscription. In fact, I only subscribe to Office because of OneDrive. For the same price as Dropbox for business, I get more storage and MS Office. It it weren’t for OneDrive, I’d be using Libre Office. I also love MS Publisher for producing flyers and brochures but I can use Scribus for those.
I agree with Ken Driver. In addition to doing regular backups using EaseUS ToDo Backup, I use FreeFileSync to back up (Mirror sync) all of my data files and configuration files for the different programs that I run. I store this on a different external HD than my EaseUS backups, and, additionally, I have it stored off site. My data files are the most important files to me; I can always put Windows and all other program files back if the Restore from EaseUS doesn’t work, but I cannot take any chances with my data files. I have FreeFileSync set to save, rather than delete, all earlier versions of my data files, as an additional precaution.
I have two usb external drives I use for my backups. Recently, I put a spare drive in one of my external enclosures and restored one of my recent full backups to it. It worked perfectly and only took a few minutes to restore. I removed that drive from the enclosure and put it in my computer. It booted and ran just fine.
Macrium works as well or better than others, but once when I needed to restore, I found all my backup files were corrupted. I had no idea. So it’s always best to have your files backed up on at least 2 different mediums, with 2 copy programs.