ShadowProtect Restore from USB3 EHD

[BobArch2]

After Bigaldoc's post on Shadow Protect Restore from CD I thought it appropriate to review my backup and restore procedures that I use with ShadowProtect.

I have always been totally satisfied with my scheduled and manual backups... without fail. The recent review of the backup processes confirmed that all is still OK.

As for the restore function, I was satisfied with past results considering that I have restored system and data drives successfully without fail from internal dedicated hard drives and external USB2 hard drives. I have never employed multi-boot systems nor have I ever had to use the Hardware Independent Restore (HIR) function in SP.

The review of the restore function yesterday showed that there is a glitch concerning my current environment.

Earlier this year I built a new system around the ASUS P8P67 Pro motherboard employing the Intel SSD SATA3 (6Gbits/s) as the system boot drive with two internal SATA3 WDC 1TB drives and two external hard drives. One of the external hard drives is a USB2 LaCie (Hitachi HD) [transferred from a previous system] and a newer Vantec NexStar3 USB3 enclosure housing a SATA3 WDC 1TB HD.

The ASUS m/b has 4 USB3 and 12 USB2 ports along with 4 SATA3 and 4 SATA2 internal connectors.

Of the two internal HD's, one is used for data files while the second is used for weekly scheduled full backups and daily incrementals using SP. The external HD on the USB2 port houses backup files created by using XCopy batch files. The Vantec NexStar USB3 with the SATA3 HD is used for scheduled monthly full backups... no incrementals using SP.

Up to this point I have used many combinations for employing a restore of the data drives using both the internal and external HDs while using ShadowProtect in the Windows environment, but not the Recovery CD. In the past, I have never had a problem using the Recovery CD to restore drives using the USB2 externals as the source. For this review, I decided to use the Recovery CD to restore drives using the monthly backup external... a USB3 device. Therein lies the glitch. SP's Recovery CD (using WinPE) did not recognize the external USB3 drive.

Research proved that the problem is within the O/S, Windows, and not with SP. There is no internal USB3 support with Windows. It is rumored that support will be there in Windows 8 but nothing earlier.

The SP Recovery CD (WinPE) is a well built application and allows for adding drivers after the boot. On one of my internal hard drives, I created a folder containing the USB3 drivers to access the ASUS Nec(Renesas) USB3 ports. Then after booting the Recovery CD it was easy enough to add the appropriate drivers and by refreshing the hard drive environment, the external USB3 HD was accessible.

Hopefully this might help anyone else using USB3 external drives and restoring backups in a WinPE environment.