Image appears to have saved Baseline

[sparkyguy]

I understand that old snapshots will be lost while imaging and restoring. However, I created an image of my Rollback Drive in early January 2011. I had a catostrophic HD failure 2-3 days later. I was smug and figured I was safe and could just restore the recently made image . . No big deal. I then restored the image into a new drive. No issues, no problems with the drive install or restore. I expected that I would need to reinstall Rollback.

Here's my problem: Every file in the image I restored appears like it was created in July 2010 (approximately the time I initially installed Rollback) and not early 2011 when the image was actually created. I'm not crazy, I checked the file date on the image file, and I've done the restore twice.

If it makes a difference, I created the image "outside" the normal OS using Windows PE & Macrium Reflect. I've understood that a "image" created from one of the imaging program (Ghost, Reflect, True-Image, or whatever) would simply save and restore the "current" image. What the heck happened??? It appears the image I created saved the Rollback "baseline" and not the "current" snapshot. Comments appreciated.

[pvsurfer]

Your problem comes about due to a misunderstanding about imaging a Rollback Rx (RBRx) partition. There are four ways to image a RBRx partition; only one of them creates an image of RBRx's baseline snapshot and that's the method you wound-up using!

Had you done the more typical disk-image backup from within Windows (with RBRx installed), you would have successfully captured your current snapshot, but the downside to this method is that when you restore this image you will have to reinstall RBRx (and some users have had to repair their MBR). Therefore, many users prefer to uninstall RBRx to their current snapshot, image the partition (from within Windows), then re-install RBRx.

If you are going to image your RBRx partition by running the imaging program from a live boot disk, you must select the 'raw' (all-sectors) mode. This is the method I use because it faithfully captures the entire RBRx environment (with all snapshots). Apparently, you didn't select the all-sectors option (assuming your imaging program offers it) when backing up your RBRx partition after booting your WinPE boot disk, so therefore it automatically defaulted to backing up your baseline snapshot.

pv

[Owl]

Exactly. In order to preserve and restore an entire RBRx environment you need to image every sector INCLUDING the MBR (Master Boot Record), and then restore that image to an identical physical environment (you might get away with an identically sized partition on a different disc).

Backing up within Windows gets you the current files, backing up the file system only (ie not imaging every sector whether the backup program thinks it needs to or not) from outside windows gets you the RBRx install baseline.

This is one of many reasons I keep my data separate from the OS, and my data partition is not within the RBRx cloak.

[Froggie]

I would like to comment here but I feel it's better to do it in a thread that is specific to this issue...

Imaging a Rollback RS protected disk

All is not as expected when doing non-OS sector-to-sector imaging... see above thread.