BMR Restore - Auto resize disk

[Robert Schieb]

Hi,

thanks for that great product, i've tested around with Veeam Endpoint Backup and noticed it's excellence software.
Good work, thanks.

Backup and recovery works great, even with BMR - Bare Metal Recovery.
But there is one point that´s important when restoring a machine to different hardware.
If the source machine (500gb hdd, filled up to 250gb) crashes and my destination machine has only a 400 gb hdd Veeam won't restore my backup.
Maybe i've overlooked a setting to adjust this problem?
But as far as i can see the destination drive has to be as big as the old drive or bigger.
It would be a nice feature to let Veeam resize the target partition to its needed size, (some kind of thin provisioning) in this case 250gb could have been enough to restore the lost data.

[Dima P.]

Hello Robert,
Thank you for sharing this idea! Volume resize is indeed not available, and if you have only one partition in your OS you would need to restore it to the drive with the same size (or more). However, if you have more than one partition in the backup you can allocate them to different hard drives manually. When you saying auto resize - you mean automatically shrink backed up volume free space?

[Robert Schieb]

Hi,

yes thats correct, or shrink it automatically to the maximum size available on the target drive.
One 500gb source hdd, filled up with 250gb data is backed up.
One 300gb target hdd for BMR, won't fit, restore wizard stops at this point.
So we have 50gb "free" space, Veeam should shrink it to 300gb to fit in an restore the backup.

Thats very important for BMR because the BMR hardware often totally differ from the original hardware.
I think that would be a smart feature for a smart backup an recovery tool.

[Dima P.]

Understood. Yes, this feature is in the high priority list and it will be included in the Veeam Endpoint Backup next versions. Again, thank you for the heads up!

[Robert Schieb]

Perfect!
Thanks for your feedback.

[gentry.beck]

I have used several different types of endpoint backup and one of the best features is the ability to backup a 250 GB SSD and restore to a 128 GB SSD if the total used space is smaller than 128 GB. Are there any plans to integrate this feature into Veeam Endpoint Backup?

[Dima P.]

gentry.beck,
Not in the first version, unfortunately.

[Honiix]

In addition to the shrink feature, it would be great to be able to extend or move the position of the partitions

Per exemple, if I've a backup made from a 160Go SSD with these partitions:

|--128Mo MSR--|-----------140Go System ------------|--8Go Recovery--|

If restore this backup as Bare Metal on a 512Go drive :

|--128Mo MSR--|-----------140Go System ------------|--8Go Recovery--|-----------------------Unallocated-----------------------|

And because of the "recovery" partition, I won't be able to extend the System partition in Windows Disk Manager.

A simple solution to that can be to allow us to move the beginning of a partition, like that:

|--128Mo MSR--|-----------140Go System ------------|-----------------------Unallocated-----------------------|--8Go Recovery--|

Then, in Windows Disk Management you can simply extend the System partition.

It's the last feature needed in order to use your software

[Dima P.]

Honiix,
Thank you. So, you want to relocate, extend and shrink partitions only during bare metal recovery or it’s required for volume level restore functionality?

[Honiix]

I guess, both?

[Dima P.]

I thought resizing under the OS is not needed - you could use file level recovery to restore individual files directly to the volume created with windows disk manager.

[Catsrules]

+1 for me on this feature.

This will be very helpful when we "upgrade" computers from a 1TB-2TB Hard drive to 128-256GB SSD.

[adrien.herve]

Hi guys,

If you're running Windows, trying to shrink a NTFS partition to be able to restore your BMR on a smaller drive, check my reply and quick workaround: http://forums.veeam.com/post155264.html#p155264

Hope this helps,

[great_vc]

Hi!
Windows 10

I'm really despered at the moment. I have uses VEEAM Agent for ages and i have managed to restore my backup (bare metal) on another disk on my pc but it had the same size. Now i have a new computer with 250GB disk in Raid 1.

My old pc and valid backup is on a disk of 1TB but only 180GB are used.

I but from USB (latest agent from backup) i select bare metal, see my NAS and select the 1 day before backup but it says cannot match disks. So i go to manual, i select the Reserved partition another one with some long \3234-dq3d23- number and when i select the c:\ it says it does not fit click to resize the backup volume. After i couple of minutes i get an error cannot resize the volume so no restore !!!!

I search i bit and i perform a defrag on the disk, stop hybernation, delete system restore, dlete page.sys, set the page file to none, restarted performed a full once backup from veeam (total file 87GB) but again the same.

Please please can someone assist on how to bypass this and restore my computer.

I'm also familiar with other tools like Hirens so if i can resize the .veeam file with another tool or something please tell me.

Many thanks for any help !!!

[RomanK]

Hello Vassilis,

This seems like a technical issue.

get an error cannot resize the volume

Do you have a support case opened? If not, please open a support case and provide the case ID in this thread so we can collect all the additional details and investigate it accordingly.

Thanks

[great_vc]

Hi and no this is not a techincal issue no need for a support ticket or anything.

The case and the problem is exactly this: post137411.html#p137411

This needs to be addressed by the product. Give a warning on backup if the disk is that form or offer a tool to re-allocate the partitions.

My solution was to buy a new SATA 1TB, restore there and then i performed the partition move from this post244608.html#p244608 so that next time i backup i will have the Windows as it should be and no errors in Shrinking or Expanding. Solve the problem once for all. After that i used Acronis to move the SATA disk to the RAID flash memory of 256GB.

Now i will perform a full backup with VEEAM and i will not care about how the partitons are stored as i will be able to restore or any size disk.

Food for thought for your R&D Technicians.

[RomanK]

Hello Vassilis,

I merged our posts into the existing discussion.

Thanks for the feedback.

[great_vc]

Thank you for the merge
2015 , now 2022

Will this issue ever be addressed ?
i think 8 years of development are enough to solve this or give a solution.

Any feedback ?

[Dima P.]

Hello Vassilis,

I am sorry to hear that you've faced the issue with shrink functionality during bare metal recovery but glad to hear that you found a workaround. Indeed, likely you had the similar issue - unmovable block at the end of you volume layout was blocking the shrink option during the Bare Metal Recovery.

Now i have a new computer with 250GB disk in Raid 1.

Mind me asking what type of device was that? Corporate laptop or MS Surface-like tablet? It's been a while since I've seen 250GB SSDs being the only installed disk. Thank you for the details!

[great_vc]

It is not an SSD its Flash
Tiny ThinkPadLenovo PC, 6CORES 16GB Memory, two flash in raid and one SATA1 enclosure