Difference between bare metal restore and clean OS installat

[Teodor]

Maybe little bit strange question, but I will explain. I had problem with my Toshiba notebook. After booting it freezes or even turn off. Veeam Backup is working every day so I did bare metal restore of complete system. It works fine but when it finished problem remains the same. Windows 10 is not booting up. I tried the same process once again with older backup whwn everything worked fine with no errors. The result was the same. Restore worked with no errors but Windows boot was impossible. Then I get original Windows DVD, do clean install and now computer is working! I can't understand this. What can it be? Thanks in advance.

[Mike Resseler]

Hi Teodor,

First: Welcome to the forums!

Most probably there is something (even in your older backups) that freezes your computer. That could be some malware that is there but only activates after date X. When you restore, you restore your computer as it was during the backup, with everything installed (including potential malware). A clean install starts from zero. What might have happened is that some sort of malware is on your machine for a long time already, waiting to activate at a certain date.

But since doing a fresh install fixed your problem, you would now be able to recover files and data from your backup also.

[Teodor]

Hi Mike,
Although I have never picked up viruses or malware (as far as I can remember) it can be.
For everything there is first time.
Thank you very much for your answer.

[Mike Resseler]

Yeah,

That is lately the nasty thing that starts to happen. It is sometimes not even malware or a virus but just something small that will act at a certain date and then maybe downloads lot of stuff. And since it froze, I can even imagine it is trying to do this, but you are blocking it through your layers of defense.

Life is becoming pretty complicated with these strange things. Another example... Ransomware that gets on your computer and doesn't do anything for months. Then it activates making sure that your last 30 days of backups will have that ransomware on it... Luckily you still can do item level recovery to get at least your data at that point in time