The Restore wizard inside Backup Intelligence 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.
Restore to physical device(s)
In order to restore to physical hardware, the target disk or partition should be unmounted (not in use). Backup Intelligence 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 , Backup Intelligence will automatically extend the restored filesystem to the fill the target partition. Backup Intelligence 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
Select a backed-up disk or partition to restore, from the left-hand column
Select a target disk or partition to write to, from the right-hand column
Click the Add to restore queue button
Repeat steps 1-3 as necessary for other disks and partitions
Click the Restore button to begin the restore job
Restore 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
This allows a user to browse the filesystem in a VMDK disk image and restore the single files and/or folders without downloading the whole VMDK disk image in advance. Currently it only supports for the NTFS.
Create USB Recovery Media
The Backup Intelligence desktop 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 Intelligence user profile, 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
WinRE ISO
Windows To Go
WinRE
Selecting this option allows the creation of a minimal USB Recovery Media based on the Windows Recovery Environment.
WinRE ISO
Selecting this option allows the creation of a minimal bootable ISO file based on the Windows Recovery Environment.
Windows To Go
Selecting this option allows the creation of a full Windows boot environment.
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 a third-party tool like [Rufus](https://rufus.ie/) to create a Windows-To-Go drive, or* using recovery media from your PC OEM vendor (e.g. Lenovo / Dell / HP)
In these cases, the Backup Intelligence app will need to be launched manually, once booted into the recovery environment.