Selecting disks and volumes

To specify disks/volumes to back up

  1. Select the check boxes for the disks and/or volumes to back up. You can select a random set of disks and volumes.

    If your operating system and its loader reside on different volumes, always include both volumes in the backup. The volumes must also be recovered together; otherwise there is a high risk that the operating system will not start.

    In Linux, logical volumes and MD devices are shown under Dynamic and GPT. For more information about backing up such volumes and devices, see “Backing up LVM volumes and MD devices (Linux)”.

  2. [Optional] To create an exact copy of a disk or volume on a physical level, select the Back up sector-by-sector check box. The resulting backup will be equal in size to the disk being backed up (if the Compression level option is set to None). Use the sector-by-sector backup for backing up drives with unrecognized or unsupported file systems and other proprietary data formats.
  3. Click OK. 
  What does a disk or volume backup store?

For supported file systems, with the sector-by-sector option turned off, a disk or volume backup stores only those sectors that contain data. This reduces the resulting backup size and speeds up the backup and recovery operations.

Windows

The swap file (pagefile.sys) and the file that keeps the RAM content when the machine goes into hibernation (hiberfil.sys) are not backed up. After recovery, the files will be re-created in the appropriate place with the zero size.

A volume backup stores all other files and folders of the selected volume independent of their attributes (including hidden and system files), the boot record, the file allocation table (FAT) if it exists, the root and the zero track of the hard disk with the master boot record (MBR). The boot code of GPT volumes is not backed up.

A disk backup stores all volumes of the selected disk (including hidden volumes such as the vendor’s maintenance partitions) and the zero track with the master boot record.

Linux

A volume backup stores all files and folders of the selected volume independent of their attributes, a boot record and the file system super block.

A disk backup stores all disk volumes as well as the zero track with the master boot record.

Selecting disks and volumes