Restoring Drive SnapShot from Linux

I use Drive Snapshot to archive our Windows machines. It is a Windows backup/disk imaging tool that does not require you to interrupt your other work in other applications. It is a good tool and has repaid its cost (US$ 57.56 in 2007 May) many times over.

Compared to other similar tools at the time, it was really the quickest and simplest one. However, its main downside was that it required DOS or Windows for restoring from scratch. DOS is troublesome to setup. There may be special drivers needed to be able to access the harddrive to be restored and also the backup files themselves. Restoring from Windows is slightly better, but only if you have another Windows machine and go through the hassle of hooking up the target drive to that machine.

Here is a method that I find easy enough for in-situ restoration. You need Live-CD Linux, QEMU and FreeDOS ISO image. I use Knoppix 5.11 since it includes QEMU.

1. Boot Knoppix to GUI mode for QEMU UI.
2. Make sure FreeDOS ISO image is accessible on a different partition/disk than the Snapshot image files (.SNA).
3. The SNA and snapshot.exe filesmust be in a FAT32 volume
4. qemu -cdrom freedos.iso -hda /dev/${fat32-partition-containing-sna-files} -hdb /dev/${target-harddrive} -boot d
5. Follow the DOS restoration instruction. For example: snapshot.exe restore HD2 MBR image.sna which restores the MBR record from the image.sna (the CWD is assumed to be C:\ which corresponds to the fat32-partition-containing-sna-files device) to HD2 (the QEMU's hdb device which is the target-harddrive).

Hope this helps.


20080904 UPDATE: A step-by-step instruction
http://gnomicnotes.blogspot.com/2008/04/actual-restoration-from-drive-snapshot.html