Restore to New Disk

[cbaksa]

All,

Please excuse me if this has already been answered.

I use Veeam Endpoint backup on my kids laptops. I am about to upgrade the drive in one of the laptops.
I will be removing a 5400RPM 500Gig disk and installing a 240Gig SSD.
The existing 500 gig drive is 80% empty. Not much installed other than office and chrome.

My question is... can i use the Veeam Endpoint full backup and restore it to a smaller disk?
As stated above... the data is still smaller then the new disk.
The OS is Windows 10.

I've not tried it so I figured I'd ask first.

Thanks

Chris

[Dima P.]

Hello Chris,

Sure its possible. Please keep in mind that logic is similar to windows shrink/expand, so at certain circumstance you wont be able to shrink the backed up volume to maximum size due some unmovable blocks residing at the end of the disk layout. Additional recommendation is to perform a defragmentation before such backup – it will sort the blocks.

[cbaksa]

Dima,

I wanted to reply to this post with my experience on this.
I performed the operation that you said to do. Full defrag and then a fresh new backup.
After that I started the process to restore to the newly installed SSD Drive.

It Failed Miserably.
Automatic was useless. So was Manual.
Nothing made sense in any way and the product seemed like it didn't know what to do either.
The Help was useless.

After several hours of battling with possibilities... I gave up and used Acronis.
I was done in less than 30 minutes (that included data restore time) using the drive clone option.

I bring this to your attention simply because the product did not do what it was advertised to do.
And it was not until I had the need to actually do it that I found this out.
I'm a seasoned IT Architect of 20 years and I gave up on it. There comes a point where time is more valuable.
I hope that you bring this back this feedback to product development as home users are supposed to be able to use this product.

If Acronis can do it 100% automatic ... Then this product can get there... But it needs alot more work.

Chris

[Mike Resseler]

Chris,

Thanks for the feedback. I'm sorry to hear that things didn't went the way as planned. If you want to restore from a larger disk to a smaller one, there is indeed some "manual" work to do but it is very limited... So you are confusing me a bit when you say it was impossible. Can you tell us a bit more what you did and where it went wrong? We are always open for feedback and love to learn more

Many thanks

Mike

[cbaksa]

Mike...

It would not allow me to select any partitions other than the EFI partition in manual mode.
That restored... But nothing else would.

I'm about to order another SSD drive for my other kids laptop as I am happy with the performance bump that the other one saw so I will need to do this exercise again.

More than happy to chat about this if you want via phone, Skype or Webex.

Chris
https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisbaksa

[Mike Resseler]

Hi Chris,

That is indeed not normal. So yes, this is something we would like to investigate. Unfortunately, I am travelling like crazy at this point in time. So what I would like to do is the following:

The moment you have that new SSD, plug it into the laptop and try to do the restore. When it fails, or better said, you can't select other volumes / partitions, cancel the operation and go to the tools menu on the recovery media. There you will have the possibility to save the logs from the operations to a removable drive or something. Let's start from there so our support / qc team can figure out what is wrong

Thanks

Mike

[cbaksa]

I will give that a try. The laptops are 100% identical.
Might not get to it until next week tho

Chris

[Dima P.]

Hello Chris,

I am sorry to hear that you are not satisfied with the product functionality. Can you please describe in more details your recovery process, specifically, manual allocation and shrink - I am trying to understand the exact step and the reason why it failed? Thank you in advance.