When using File & Folder backups, and trying to restore to an alternative drive, why does it not allow you to choose your own base directory? For example, if you got a single folder that you back up in drive D:, and you try to restore that to something other than drive D, you will always be forced to choose something like "\Drive (d)\Folder1", even if all you want to restore is Folder1?

The only way I have been able to get around this is to mount the backup file as a virtual drive, and copy from the proper folder.

That's correct.  I'm guessing the design intent here is to provide a single design that would support any combination of folder selections, in that a single F&F backup can data backed up from multiple original source drives, so it always uses the drive as the root.  But this behavior admittedly caught me off guard once when I just wanted to restore a single folder.  Mounting the backup as a virtual drive works fine as long as a) none of the files you're restoring are larger than 4GB, and b) you don't care about restoring any custom NTFS permissions that may have been applied to the source data.

+x

 

jphughan - 12 November 2018 2:57 PM

That's correct.  I'm guessing the design intent here is to provide a single design that would support any combination of folder selections, in that a single F&F backup can data backed up from multiple original source drives, so it always uses the drive as the root.  But this behavior admittedly caught me off guard once when I just wanted to restore a single folder.  Mounting the backup as a virtual drive works fine as long as a) none of the files you're restoring are larger than 4GB, and b) you don't care about restoring any custom NTFS permissions that may have been applied to the source data.

Well, I am interested in doing all of that, as the folder I'm trying to restore is the Users folder!

If you're trying to restore your Users folder, you shouldn't try to restore your root user folder into the Users folder directly if you don't already have a user profile folder.  You should also generally avoid restoring the NTUser.dat file in the root of your user profile folder, and restoring the AppData folder might be dicey as well depending on circumstances.  But if you just want to restore all of the "regular" subfolders of your user profile, e.g. Desktop, Documents, etc., then you don't have to worry about custom NTFS permissions, because they just inherit permissions from the their parent object, which would be your root folder at the Users level.  Files larger than 4GB would be a problem though, because when you mount a F&F backup, they get broken up into as many 4GB virtual files as necessary -- so if you just copy an entire folder that happens to contain such a file, you might not notice that this has happened until you try to access that file later, and I don't know of a utility to "reconstitute" the original file from those components.  (If you're curious, the reason is that F&F mounted backups emulate a FAT32 file system, and FAT32 doesn't allow files larger than 4GB.  Macrium has said they're looking into emulating other file systems that would remove this limitation.)  Anyhow, I would suggest just restoring the subfolders you want to another location on the same partition as your actual Users folder and then just moving (cutting and pasting) the restored contents into their proper location.

One thing I should note is that the User folder is not located on the same drive as the operating system. I've moved it to the D: drive, years ago. So it's been backed up by a F&F backup ever since.

+x

 

YKhan - 13 November 2018 9:19 PM

One thing I should note is that the User folder is not located on the same drive as the operating system. I've moved it to the D: drive, years ago. So it's been backed up by a F&F backup ever since.

That's fine.  The only reason I recommended restoring to an alternate location on the same partition as the "final destination" is because that's required if you want the subsequent move operation to be basically instantaneous, since that scenario just involves updating the partition's file system to say that those files are now in a new folder location.  If on the other hand you initially restore to Partition A and then move the contents to Partition B, the operation will be a "copy and delete", which will of course take longer.