A good backup strategy consists of two things: A way to create backups – and a way to restore them. We often think only of the first step, while assuming that the restore process will “just work”. Until it does not work and we start sitting in hot seats in hours of need.
A recent crash during a VMware Workstation upgrade caused by a page fault error in a Citrix USB passthrough driver left my system in a bad state. Instead of going the painful route of trying to manually repair the damage done, I opted for a rollback to my last backup. Why spend hours wrangling with the registry and obscure driver catalogues when a rollback only takes 10 minutes, right?
As a huge fan of Macrium Reflect Home this could not be easier: Start Macrium Reflect, select the backup I want to restore, select the partitions to restore, reboot and let the restore process run.
In theory. Ideally. If everything goes well.
In practice, Macrium Reflect prepared itself, rebooted the machine, and the WinRE-based rescue environment booted up. Macrium Reflect started loading. And then it was stuck on a “Loading wpeinit” step, seemingly hanging. After 10 minutes of waiting, I hit the Escape key and the application kept loading – however without the required drivers, so a restore was not possible because no network drivers were available.
So what’s up with this?
In Macrium Reflect you have several options when it comes to building a rescue media. You can either create an ISO file, prepare a USB thumb drive, or use a WIM image to create an extra environment that gets added to the Windows boot loader.
I was using the additional boot menu entry with the normal Windows WinRE-based environment as a base image, as that is what Macrium recommends within the application.
This WinRE image seems to be fucked on both machines I have tried booting it.
However, as it turns out, a clean image labeled as “Windows PE 10 (WADK)” you are able to select under the “Advanced” button in the “Create Rescue Media” is a better fit and will work. It is likely that local WinRE images are somehow corrupted, although I did not investigate this any further.
After automatically downloading and building the image, I was able to boot into the refreshed Macrium rescue media and restore my backup without any issues.
The lesson here is to quickly check whether or not you can actually boot the rescue media. Do not trust blindly in the process, actually test it. Repeat these tests at regular intervals. It does not take long and will save your butt when you need the process to work.
Ideally, I would like to use something like Bootimus to offer these environments via PXE on my network, however given the graceless way Bootimus handles Windows-based images, I highly doubt I will ever be able to use or trust it to work reliably. iVentoy would work reliably, however the product behaves shady – a real shame.
Something like a IODD ST400 looks to be a better option, however given the current SSD prices I simply cannot afford a combination of device and (sufficiently large) drive.
A much cheaper option is creating a rescue environment on a USB thumb drive. This is the option I will be pursuing, as a cheap SanDisk thumb drive is only a few bucks and having a physical media to boot from gives me more peace of mind.
As a final thought, I must re-iterate my recommendation for people to do their backups daily. You do not need them often, and with good software like Macrium Reflect Home you can set up the backup once and then just let it run in the background.
