Image Backup of Win10 WinRE Partition

client
1

First of all, I’ve found UrBackup to be a great product. I’m testing it now with the intent of replacing my whs2011 box for backing up my computers at home.

One of the partitions created when installing Win10 is the recovery partition. In my case it’s the 845MB one from Microsoft from their standard Win10 install disk (not a vendor like Dell). The linux fdisk command reports this as partition type 27 “Hidden NTFS WinRE”. A Linux “ntfsfix -n /dev/vda3” confirms it’s in ntfs format. I did a full image backup with server version v2.2.5. with “Volumes to Backup” set to ‘ALL’ in the image backup options. After the backup I saw two entries for ‘SYSVOL’ and drive ‘C’ on the server web page but nothing for the recovery partition. Then I wiped the disk and booted from the restore ISO v2.1.1 to restore my Win10 image. I then successfully booted up the restored Win10 image. However I could not use the recovery options from the recovery partition. I used Linux to study the restored drive. Although the recovery partition was recreated the partition appeared to be empty. UrBackup probably used the MBR to allocate the recovery partition along with all the others but it must bypass that partition in the image backups. I know the recovery partition does not have a drive letter but the ‘SYSVOL’ partition doesn’t either and yet UrBackup is able to restore that.

My workaround for this was just to boot to Linux and do an image backup of the recovery partition with dd to another disk. I don’t think that partition changes after an install so backing it up once should be OK. But my question is whether there’s some other method to tell UrBackup to back up this recovery partition on an image backup.

My compliments on a great product. I’m thoroughly testing UrBackup before I retire my whs2011 box and replace it with UrBackup. So far UrBackup has worked well even on old WinXP images (after I used the older restore ISO). UrBackup may be working as designed by not backing up the Win10 WinRE partition but I thought I’d ask if there’s a better workaround or plant an idea for a possible future enhancement.

Thanks.

2

Hello!
I’m also have theese questions about some new lenovo laptops with about 5-6 partitions on 1 hdd.
Now I have to use clonzilla (and so on), for create initial backups of laptops before users got it in hands.
Howewer, it will be great do it by UrB - first initial backup of entire hdd with all partitions hidden, recovery and so on.

3

It backups the partitions that it needs for booting. You probably can map other partitions to volume letters and backup those as well by adding them to the volumes to backup.

4

some partitions is hidden, system, etc, and cannot be simle map on letters, so, it is no normal way to back it