Hi there,
I've been doing some extensive testing recently with the wbadmin.exe tool in preparation for a potential solution roll-out across a number of our clients. In short we've used Norton Ghost for a number of years to provide system imaging functions with rapid recovery but it's getting long in the tooth now and even the replacement product (SRS 2013) doesn't seem to like Windows 10 systems very much.
I've performed extensive testing with wbadmin.exe. on both desktop and server products and I've found the backup side of things especially to function very well. It would be nice to have to have more scheduling and differential options rather than the fixed 14 day differential cycle but that's a limit we could certainly live with.
However things have been a bit more problematic on the recovery side.
There is the built-in limitation that you have to restore with a matching recovery disk for the platform which is a bit of a nightmare. We have Windows 7, 8, 8.1 and 10 workstations across different clients along with various server products and having to dig out the corresponding x86 or x64 matching Windows disk each time is a major chore. Is there are solution to this or any future solution planned?
The second problem I've hit is trying to restore back from a disk to a smaller one, a niche scenario but one that is increasingly common as users move from HDD to SSD. Try as I might I could not get the system to recover to a smaller disk. I have tried:
-Shrinking the partition of the VHD backup image
-Shrinking the VHD of the backup itself using the VHDResizer tool
-Meticulously Editing the Components.xml file to correct the partition values in there
-Attempting a System Image Recovery in the Windows RE wizard
-Attempting a manual recovery in Windows RE using:
wbadmin start recover -backupTarget:<backup> -recoveryTarget:C: -version:<version> -itemType:Volume -items:C:
In the former method I just get increasing obscure messages about "no usuable disk" being available.
In the latter method it tells me that the target partition is too small - even though I have verified on another machine that both the VHD partition and the VHD disk itself (as reported in diskpart on another machine) are nearly half the size of the target partition.
I'm completely baffled because I can't see any other file in the backup archive that could be falsely informing wbadmin.exe that the backup archive is too big. Does the Catalogue also store the size of the backup partitions?
Any advice would be very very welcome, I'm tearing my hair out with this and it's annoying because in all other aspects wbadmin.exe is doing exactly what we want it to do and it's only this little thing which is being annoying.
EDIT: More information on this. I'm almost certain that both the VHD size and the Components.xml values are not factored in to the wbadmin of partition sizes (at least in the first instance.). I have tested thoroughly editing both files and thewbadmin get items report still returns the old value. I'm now convinced that it is either the GlobalCatalogue or BackupCatalogue files which contain the data but I have not figured out a way that these files could be changed.
Possibly flogging a dead horse here and the short answer is: NO, you cannot restore a backup onto a smaller drive, you need to resize the partition before you make the backup. However I'm almost addicted to this problem now so I'm going to keep tinkering and see if I can find a hack
Olly