Backup progress

On any recovery-type procedure, you need room to work.

A laptop for example, might only have the one port for a disk drive.

A desktop, you can place several drives inside it (if you have the trays inside the thing). My Optiplex Refurb has room for two trays, but only one tray is provided. This makes it rather useless as my Technician machine. A good technician box would have room for three disk drives. That's usually enough for a lot of surgery cases.

The reason for the "trays", is to do this. Now, some of this can be done with USB enclosures for disk drives. But not a lot of people have the nice enclosures available to do it that way.

Restoration target (restore to the original <=== Win7 backup drive, restore basic image drive, or place a store-bought new drive in the technician machine) win7 restore, can run from a Windows Installer DVD troubleshooter section.

Restoration target (restore to the original <=== Now, copy the up-to-date mail profile from the drive, or place a store-bought original disk, onto the new disk. Copy the new drive in the technician machine) current Downloads folder over. This step is optional if the original drive was ruined/destroyed

In this way, you start with the backup from three weeks ago, and add back any materials collected since then. You need an up-to-date email folder if using a POP3 account.

You have to think pretty carefully, where bits and pieces are still hiding on the original drive, to put everything back. The alternative would be to make daily backups (I won't be doing that, too lazy).

For example, a "bookmarks file" may be hiding in the Firefox profile folder and needs to be restored. There might only be a couple bookmarks more in there, than the column on the left has.

Notice how in my picture, I handily managed to "invent" a new drive on the left :-) The new drive must be at least as big as the original drive - I don't think Win7 Backup comes with a resize capability, but you can check and see.

The drives are generally pretty good on canonical size. Two 1TB drives, tend to have the same byte count as each other, which makes the software "very happy". You can also restore onto a larger drive - the Windows 7 software has to at least be clever enough to know that the secondary GPT table needs to be moved up to the end of the new larger drive, to work properly. The GPT partition tables are redundant, two of them provided in case one is trashed. I find that generally, the handling of those, isn't all that good.

For a laptop drive, you can start with a desktop (physically larger hard drive) and start your rebuilding process on the desktop drive. Then, as a last step, you can clone the

Each VHD or VHDX file in the backup, is a single partition on the original disk drive. Even if the restore software was broken, don't panic, as with some work, you can clone the VHD file contents to a new disk. You would likely want help with that. I haven't needed to do that. Newer tried to rebuild a disk, from all those tiny pieces in the backup folder.

Paul

Snip thorough technical advice!

Paul, you should know my technical limitations:-)

I expect the W7 box could be restored by someone with your skills. However, my current need is to have the ability using the Dell W11 to dip into the portable drive used to back up the old W7 data. An example might be to copy saved photo files.

The files saved from the box that preceded W7 open happily in W11 but the recent stuff is compacted into one huge file.

I still use W7 backup, even though I upgraded to W10 Pro from W7 Pro (32).

I use a MyCloud device connected via ethernet and I can just click on the backup files and drill down and down and W10 just unzips them all until I finally get to the individual files.

The backup capability has a couple of options.

I thought you were referring to the "System Image" which uses .vhd or .vhdx files.

There is also an option to back up personal files, such as Documents or Downloads, into ZIP-like files.

itsmine.cmd [Script to take ownership of the top directory...]

takeown /f %1 /r /d y icacls %1 /grant administrators:F /t

D:\ itsmine.cmd WALLACE # top level of my ZIPs

The ZIPs here are not conventional. To figure out the scheme, we can test. This is the bait. The ISO file is hardly compressible. The unsentmessages file is an email MBOX file with English text, and can be readily compressed to a smaller size (maybe 3:1 compression ratio).

Directory of C:\Users\Bullwinkle\Downloads

Tue, 10/29/2024 10:25 AM <DIR> . Wed, 10/19/2022 11:58 PM <DIR> .. Fri, 10/25/2024 03:11 PM 2,630,877,184 boot-repair-disk-64bit-2023.iso <=== does not compress well Mon, 02/27/2023 04:58 AM 4,160,340,125 UnsentMessages01.txt <=== does compress well

This is the output. 1.zip is one file type. 2-9 are the txt file. 10-24 are the ISO (enough bytes present if not compressed).

Tue, 10/29/2024 10:28 AM 159,820,456 Backup files 1.zip Tue, 10/29/2024 10:28 AM 209,288,796 Backup files 2.zip Tue, 10/29/2024 10:28 AM 209,154,924 Backup files 3.zip Tue, 10/29/2024 10:29 AM 209,020,745 Backup files 4.zip Tue, 10/29/2024 10:29 AM 208,887,100 Backup files 5.zip Tue, 10/29/2024 10:29 AM 208,752,867 Backup files 6.zip Tue, 10/29/2024 10:29 AM 208,618,900 Backup files 7.zip Tue, 10/29/2024 10:29 AM 120,983,412 Backup files 8.zip Tue, 10/29/2024 10:29 AM 22 Backup files 9.zip Tue, 10/29/2024 10:29 AM 10,679,585 Backup files 10.zip Tue, 10/29/2024 10:29 AM 209,321,982 Backup files 11.zip Tue, 10/29/2024 10:29 AM 209,189,786 Backup files 12.zip Tue, 10/29/2024 10:29 AM 209,057,590 Backup files 13.zip Tue, 10/29/2024 10:29 AM 208,925,394 Backup files 14.zip Tue, 10/29/2024 10:29 AM 208,793,198 Backup files 15.zip Tue, 10/29/2024 10:29 AM 208,661,002 Backup files 16.zip Tue, 10/29/2024 10:29 AM 208,528,806 Backup files 17.zip Tue, 10/29/2024 10:29 AM 208,396,610 Backup files 18.zip Tue, 10/29/2024 10:29 AM 208,264,414 Backup files 19.zip Tue, 10/29/2024 10:29 AM 208,132,218 Backup files 20.zip Tue, 10/29/2024 10:29 AM 208,000,022 Backup files 21.zip Tue, 10/29/2024 10:29 AM 207,867,826 Backup files 22.zip Tue, 10/29/2024 10:29 AM 127,741,654 Backup files 23.zip Tue, 10/29/2024 10:29 AM 22 Backup files 24.zip

The first file 1.zip, is all the small rubbish files in my requested backup. The Bullwinkle account is a test account, and is normally never used. That's why most of the libraries fit into 159MB of file space. Applying the WinZIP toolage to the 159MB file, will restore the set of small files, all the files will be intact.

But the rest of the files, are a puzzle. Inside each ZIP, are portions of one of the test files. 2.zip has 24 parts *of the same file*. I don't have a tool to concatenate the pieces, to restore this (to automate the unpacking process). Similarly the 3.zip file, its pieces go on the end of the last group of pieces. The 9.zip is an empty ZIP file they seem to be using as a marker.

It turns out, the Windows 7 backup is a lot more complicated than I expected. It is supposed to use shadow copies for some of it, and assigned space for the rest (like the ZIPs). It appears to support a form of incremental copy (for the ZIPs I would presume). The System Images are stored under D:\WindowsImageBackups and under there I think is a machine name or some sort of name if the same backup drive is used on multiple computers.

The System Image files are easier. This is something I can handle. See how short this section is ?

Have to make my diagram first, from a ton of pieces. You can mount the .vhdx file . A dialog will pop up with disparaging information, but the damn mount actually worked and you can ignore the dialog. Either .vhd or .vhdx can be mounted, but on W10/W11 the mount (of .vhdx) has in the past required some part of Hyper-V to be enabled.

I had some fun with the ZIP files, of the file backup part. This is using 7-ZIP from 7-ZIP.org

"C:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z.exe" l "*".zip # list contents of all the zips

If a series of ZIPs have the same file name inside each one, they can be decompressed and streamed to a single output file, rebuilding the original file.

Tue, 10/29/2024 06:33 PM 209,288,884 Backup files 2.zip Tue, 10/29/2024 06:34 PM 209,154,888 Backup files 3.zip Tue, 10/29/2024 06:34 PM 209,020,780 Backup files 4.zip Tue, 10/29/2024 06:34 PM 208,886,927 Backup files 5.zip Tue, 10/29/2024 06:34 PM 208,752,748 Backup files 6.zip Tue, 10/29/2024 06:34 PM 208,618,689 Backup files 7.zip Tue, 10/29/2024 06:34 PM 120,983,122 Backup files 8.zip Tue, 10/29/2024 09:45 PM 4,160,340,125 streamed_output

The problem is, each of those files looks similar to this. The output file "Unsent Messages01.txt" is repeated multiple times inside the file. SO you gather up all the ZIP files suffering from this, and you change the filenames so they will run in order if necessary. They may not be in alphabetical order, without fiddling with the ZIP filename in some cases.

Path = Backup files 8.zip Type = zip Physical Size = 120983122

Date Time Attr Size Compressed Name

------------------- ----- ------------ ------------ ------------------------

------------------- ----- ------------ ------------ ------------------------

To process ZIP files 2 through 8, dump all the files inside (so they don't overwrite one another), and concatenate them end to end, it goes like this. You CD to the directory where you have placed files 2 through 8 (and no other ZIP files). The tool is not clever enough, to be fed identifiers to restrict the range of files processed. So you have to make a directory to work in, to do this.

# Send all zips, all the identical-named files to stdout. Processes 2.zip through 8.zip . # The output filename, I have some idea what is the intended filename, so it is placed on the end of the command.

"C:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z.exe" x -so "*".zip 2>> _garbage.txt >> "Unsent Messages01.txt"

I ran some checksums and I got the original file back.

If the last ZIP happens to look like this, the second entry (an alternate stream) needs to be deleted. The behavior here is outside of anything I know of that ZIP supports. If you run the above multi-ZIP command, it puts that 26 bytes on the end of the other file, and the output file is then 26 bytes bigger than it should be.

Path = Backup files 23.zip Type = zip Physical Size = 127743766

Date Time Attr Size Compressed Name

------------------- ----- ------------ ------------ ------------------------

We shouldn't be doing it this way, but when I tried the intended recipe, it didn't seem to do anything. That's computers for you...

Paul

No, that's winders for you.

Rsync on linux merely requires that you have disk space as large as the original for the backup.

Assuming all you want is a nightly backup in case tomorrow the whole thing crashes.

I got on with the job and the interface works. It was just my assumption, it wasn't finding anything. But it was there, just needed the button on the right. (I was expecting to see acknowledgement/feedback right away.)

The Microsoft one has "System Image", which is a disaster recovery version of a backup. Put a new disk drive in the system, restore, and it's all there.

The file level backup, tends to be for people who don't care about their OS and applications, and just want their data to be backed up. That's what I was testing above.

Paul