How does Windows backup work?

A

antipunt1

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 30, 2008
Messages
170
Hi all,

My hard drive crashed recently (D Drive). It's currently in the freezer for a final attempt at salvaging data (bc I don't want to spend hundreds of dollars). The only other hope is that on my other backup harddrive (E: drive),Windows Backup has been performed on it. It currently shows 3.62gb free of 931gb, which makes me think that it saved a chunk of data from the D drive. However, whenever I try to access the files, it amounts to a copy of my C drive (which is my main drive), which is at most 24 gb of data. In other words, it doesn't look like my D drive was copied at all. But then what is taking up that other 931gb of data. I've already unhidden all hidden folders and looked into every folder I can and can't find any reason for all this space being taken up.

When Windows Backup runs, is it even supposed to backup other drives other than the C drive? This is my first time using it for restoration.

Thanks so much in advance. There's gigabytes of data on the D Drive I don't want to lose. A friend says data retrieval costs hundreds if not thousands of dollars to perform because they have to diddle with the actual drive itself.

Thanks so much and I'll update if the freezer thing works.
 
A big chunk of data on drive E may be eaten up by volume shadow snapshots. From within an elevated (administrative) command prompt, type in the command "vssadmin list shadows" and hit enter. That should list out all the volume snapshots that exist on your system's drives. If there are like a hundred of them, then you may have found your culprit. Unfortunately, you may not have found your culprit in a way that helps you restore data, since volume snapshots on drive E will consist of data at points-in-time from drive E itself, not other drives.

Also, this doesn't help at all, but your subject was "How does Windows backup work?" and the technical answer to that question is "Not very well."
 
Thanks for all the info.

Also in case anyone was interested with what happened, there's thankfully a happy ending. The freezer brought my HD back to life and I was able to extract all the data I needed off it :)
 
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