Solved AOMEI Backupper (Free Standard Edition) Review

mounted the vhd(x) in disk management and restored the adi file contents to it.

How else?

you can see from my earlier screenshots. Backupper has no problem detecting it.

SIW2 said:

mounted the vhd(x) in disk management and restored the adi file contents to it.

How else?

Click to expand...

Well, I can try it again, as I wrote before the mounted VHDX drive never showed as a target so did you see the mounted VHDX drive as a target drive when restoring with AOMI? Just restoring blindly hoping it will end up correctly in the virtual drive is not something I want to try. Maybe support misunderstood my question and it can be done, I will try it again later.
Frank

I am in win7 atm so I will do it with a .vhd.

first mount the .vhd



there it is now in diskmgmt



then choose an .adi to restore





select the mounted vhd as the destination



and off you go

FrankW said:

Well, I can try it again, as I wrote before the mounted VHDX drive never showed as a target so did you see the mounted VHDX drive as a target drive when restoring with AOMI? Just restoring blindly hoping it will end up correctly in the virtual drive is not something I want to try. Maybe support misunderstood my question and it can be done, I will try it again later.
Frank

Click to expand...

If you create a new vhdx file, you need to create a primary partition and format it as NTFS and assign a drive letter just like you would do with any physical drive that is not set up.

Then AOMEI will see it so it can restore to it.

If you are mounting an existing vhdx, you may need to assign drive letter to existing partition. Frank, to be frank , I would create a new vhdx file rarher than try and restore to existing vhdx file.

@SIW2
I never tried partion restore just full disk restore with AOMEI, and "unlocated" instead of Disk 2 or drive ? (did you not formatted your VHDX drive?) is kind of vague, but I will give it a try, can you boot that vhdx drive without a name? I may try it on my old Windows 10 HP mini.
But you are correct the virtual disk shows in partition restore!
Frank

(did you not formatted your VHDX drive?)

no.





and there it is.

cereberus said:

If you create a new vhdx file, you need to create a primary partition and format it as NTFS and assign a drive letter just like you would do with any physical drive that is not set up.

Then AOMEI will see it so it can restore to it.

If you are mounting an existing vhdx, you may need to assign drive letter to existing partition. Frank, to be frank , I would create a new vhdx file rarher than try and restore to existing vhdx file.

Click to expand...

I did all that but used Full Disk Restore, not Partition Restore, not sure if Partition Restore will include al the system info, I will try both with a new VHDX drive on my old laptop.

SIW2 said:

(did you not formatted your VHDX drive?)

no.



View attachment 36759

and there it is.




View attachment 36760

Click to expand...

But will it boot?
Frank

just leave it as unallocated space.

But will it boot?

Click to expand...

no idea, I have never tried.

you would need all the os partitions ( including esp partion ), and the correct bcd entry.

SIW2 said:

just leave it as unallocated space.



no idea, I have never tried.

you would need all the os partitions ( including esp partion ), and the correct bcd entry.

Click to expand...

I will give AOMEI Full Disk Restore one more try, maybe it will see the mounted VHD (fixed size) drive like TODO did, will also try to resstore *.adi on an external USB drive and let you know those results. The main goal of all this is testing reliability of backups by booting a restored drive and running some large programs (Office). TODO did all that "easily", AOMEI had issues and W7 Backup Restore even failed when restoring all my files. AOMEI Partition Restore will probably not restore the OS partitions or you have to add these later (hassle).

@cereberus
@SIW2
Two reasons why AOMEI did not see the VDHX drive on my old W10 HP Mini yesterday: The VDHX folder is in the root (C:\) and that means the folder and files were hidden and read only (W10 file convention). Explorer is set to show hidden files so I did not notice this. The second reason is that Hyper-V Data Exchange Service and 7 more Hyper-V services were all disabled and that probably caused the initialization of the Virtual F drive to fail as I don't remember seeing the F: drive in Explorer after init. I did see the F drive this time when I Initialized the VHDX drive (and the VDH on my Acer).

This second attempt to restore to VHDX with AOMEI had no problem detecting my F: drive both in Full Disk and Partition Restore. The format of VHDX F: drive is MBR, dynamic 100 GB (the .adi file is 60 GB). However Full Disk restore failed (bad target disk?) Volume restore went OK.

When checking AOMEI FAQ issues, virtual disks are mentioned (Full Disk Restore not possible yet) confirmed by e-mail from AOMEI support:
"For MBR dynamic volumes, you can use System Backup and Partition Backup way (System/Partition Clone). Disk Backup/Disk Clone function is not supported yet. When restoring, you can only restore to the original location or a basic disk."

I don't want to try this on my Acer anymore but will try to restore a USB external drive and boot with it on my Acer.

You guys are 100% correct; AOMEI will detect a virtual disk but I don't think you can create a bootable VHDX drive with AOMEI like what I did with EaseUS Todo.

Why did you ask about dynamic volumes?

Dynamic disks are a separate form of volume management that allows volumes to have noncontiguous extents on one or more physical disks...All volumes on dynamic disks are known as dynamic volumes.

Click to expand...

Mount your vhdx in disk management and it will tell you.

SIW2 said:

Why did you ask about dynamic volumes?



Mount your vhdx in disk management and it will tell you.

View attachment 36801

Basic and Dynamic Disks - Win32 apps

Describes two disk storage types and discusses partition styles.

docs.microsoft.com

Click to expand...

That quote you are referring to was from their FAQ website, their e-mail (Fiona) simply stated that it cannot be done, only physical disk drives can be restored.

When you mount your expanding vhdx in disk management what kind of disk does it say ?

SIW2 said:

When you mount your expanding vhdx in disk management what kind of disk does it say ?

Click to expand...

Sorry, I deleted everything on my HP-Mini, I formatted my VHDX on my Acer as VDH, fixed (not expanding), previously I had it as VHDX dynamic 100 GB expendable but EaseUS Todo would not recover to that format (Insufficient disk space). I will use the latter as my main backup system not because it can recover to VHDX (probably will never do that) but because it restored and booted. Next will be my test for AOMEI to restore to a USB external drive, if that boots OK I will use both programs for my monthly backups. Won't use W7 Backup anymore.

Note on EaseUS Todo freeware: EaseUS Agent Service stays running in perpetuity even after you close the progarm, using some resources and slowing down the booting a bit. I haven't checked the telemetry of EaseUs Agent Service, supposedly it records your file history but I disabled it in services.msc, EaseUS won't start with the Agent service disabled so you have to set the service to Manual first in services.msc and then start EaseUS, no issues yet detected with EaseUS Todo when disabling the agent . No services other than Updating (also disabled) noticed with AOMEI.

@SIW2 @cereberus The AOMEI Full disk Restore external (SSD) drive exercise proved a complete failure, not only took it many hours more to restore (10 MB/s average speed) when compared to EaseUS but also AOMEI made a mess of the target volumes (format, tried both NTFS and Exfat) on the SSD to the point Explorer could not read the disk (did not bother to boot the SSD). I keep selecting Full Disk Restore but the Restore results always indicate “Partition Restore”. Conclusion a Full Disk Restore (that boots) can only be achieved with AOMEI when the target drive is the original source of the .adi Backup file, nothing else works. EaseUS Todo is clearly the winner here both in speed and performance (allows recovery to variable target drives incl. VHDX). I don't understand why my 2TB Seagate Expansion Portable (SSD) Drive I just bought is so slow on a USB 3.1 port, I tested the SSD with Winsat and got only 14 mb/s max. reading, must be my MOBO and slow internal HDD. When I copied the VHDX file from C; to E: (SSD) I got an average of 10 MB/s (took 4 hours for 140 GB file), All my drives are checked and healthy I cannot TRIM my SSD (now Exfat format) TRIM only works with NTFS.

FrankW said:

@SIW2 @cereberus The AOMEI Full disk Restore external (SSD) drive exercise proved a complete failure, not only took it many hours more to restore (10 MB/s average speed) when compared to EaseUS but also AOMEI made a mess of the target volumes (format, tried both NTFS and Exfat) on the SSD to the point Explorer could not read the disk (did not bother to boot the SSD). I keep selecting Full Disk Restore but the Restore results always indicate “Partition Restore”. Conclusion a Full Disk Restore (that boots) can only be achieved with AOMEI when the target drive is the original source of the .adi Backup file, nothing else works. EaseUS Todo is clearly the winner here both in speed and performance (allows recovery to variable target drives incl. VHDX). I don't understand why my 2TB Seagate Expansion Portable (SSD) Drive I just bought is so slow on a USB 3.1 port, I tested the SSD with Winsat and got only 14 mb/s max. reading, must be my MOBO and slow internal HDD. When I copied the VHDX file from C; to E: (SSD) I got an average of 10 MB/s (took 4 hours for 140 GB file), All my drives are checked and healthy I cannot TRIM my SSD (now Exfat format) TRIM only works with NTFS.

Click to expand...

The problem is more your understanding. AOEMI either does a disk backup or a partition backup. A disk backup backs up all partitions, a partition backs up selected partitions. You can only do a restore of type of backup e.g. a disk restore if you did a disk backup i e. all partitions are restored. You can select to restore just one partition at a time.

Worse, a partition backup will backup some or all partitions but the stupid program only allows one partition to be restored at a time.

Your conclusion about disk restore is completely wrong. I just did a disk backup, and restored to a new vhdx file, added boot entry and it works fine.

I have no idea what you are doing wrong but I suspect you did a partition backup not a disk backup.

In any case you just cannot restore to an external drive and boot from it as the bcd on external drive will not be setup up correctly as a Windows to Go drive.


All I can say is this sort of crappy behaviour is why I use the far superior Macrium Reflect Free as it does not differentiate between a full disk backup or a partition backup. It is essentially just partition backups and user decides which to backup or restore.

Although tools like AOMEI and Easus are perhaps easier for beginners, once you go beyond basic backup and restores, they are quite limited. Reflect has far more versatility, once you get the hang of dragging and dropping partitions to different drives, reordering etc.

I apologise, but I am afraid I have reached the point where I cannot help you any further as you are doing things incorrectly, drawing wrong conclusions and the investment in my time trying to sort it is too high now. You need to slow down, learn how to use the various tools efficiently, and then gradually graduate to more complicated tasks.

Good luck.

Hi @cereberus
"I have no idea what you are doing wrong but I suspect you did a partition backup not a disk backup." Nope, I selected twice Full disk backup but AOMEI still flips to Partition Backup, I agree that this is a first timer for me but a backup is supposed to be an automatic and easy understandable procedure for Windows users like me, not a technical chore for IT specialists. Whatever, I learned a lot about the subject, VHDX creation and that W7 Backup is unreliable. Thanks for you help

FrankW said:

I just made a full backup with AOMEI Standard freeware version and it took 7 hours for only 120 GB data to complete plus another whopping 4 hours to check the image file. It takes 1 hour to make the same backup with Window7 BU. I also was disappointed that I could not explore the image file (mount on a virtual drive) in the free version so probably will resort to my W7 backups to extract/find individual files or start using File History in Windows11. I believe the differential BU with AOMEI will go a lot faster than full BUs so I will try that next. To fully restore just select the diferential backup (no need to restore the full backup)? I will use both W7 and AOMEI for my backups.
Frank

Click to expand...

Something's wrong. I can backup my 600GB on my system drive in under an hour with AOMEI. I don't ever do the check. I always do full backups. I have never even tried the incremental thing.