AtomicInternet Archived News

Since there is no 64-bit connector for Windows Home Server, I enjoy the irony of having to manually back up my most-likely-to-fail 64-bit Vista RAID 0 workstation. The 3 drive RAID has served me well until recently when I started running short on space. A spare drive I had on hand in case one failed was the perfect solution, and after reading a very happy tutorial on the Complete Backup/Restore tool in Vista, I was full of rainbows and bunnies about the whole process. The backup was surprisingly fast and wiping out my RAID was almost as satisfying as recreating it with the fourth drive, bumping my failure potential up to 4 times as likely vs. a single drive. The happy sunshine restore procedure worked great until an ugly "wrong size/number of drives" error refused to let me restore anything. A 2 hour odyssey of trying various disk/size/volume/partition/drive letter combinations to satisfy this error yielded no results. Fortunately a google search located this rant of people who also found the restore procedure less exciting than advertised. Apparently the folks in charge of this feature for Vista decided allowing you to restore to something other than the exact same drive configuration as you backed up from would frighten and confuse the average user. Since the point of a backup is to allow you to recover from a drive failure, you would think mapping your old volumes to new ones would be a common sense feature to include. Instead, after researching the recovery console command line, I pieced together the magic command to restore to whatever drive configuration you please: wbadmin start recovery -version:12/23/2007-05:59 itemtype:volume -items:c: -backuptarget:h: -recoverytarget:c:, replacing the version/drive values as needed. Obviously this is much easier to remember than providing a simple dropdown to select which drive you want to restore to.