Urgent Restore Help Needed

[JohnrC]

Firstly, does anyone know what the hours of operations are for Paragon tech-support? I leave voicemail open tickets etc. but haven’t heard back.

Trying to recover from a system that was hit by virus where many files were corrupt/encrypted but did not fully execute. I would like to restore from paragon version 16 back up which exists (incremental) on an external hard drive connected to this laptop by USB.

I created recovery media on USB flash drive. In doing so I did not use WAIK

I can boot into Paragon recovery using the flash drive, but get stuck on the 2nd stage of recovery where the tab says “Backup selection”. How is this different from the 3rd tab that says “Source”?

In any event, Backup Selection tab is red. If the next tab selects the Source where the backup lives, then I presume I’m now being asked what drives I want restored. If correct, I can’t make any selections that lights up the “Next” button.

If instead i’m being asked to select a backup to restore, I cannot see the external hard drives when plugged into any USB port. Even though I can feel the external hard drives rotating, and even though the external drives are completely functional in Windows 10 64 bit Home version.

That was last night. Making matters worse today, the laptop is not even seeing the C drive anymore regardless of how I set boot sequence in the system bios. What a mess.

I do have a new HD that I can install, but that probably won’t help me with my other problem stated above in trying to move through the restore process.

Desperate. Time is of the essence of course. Any help or guidance would be tremendously appreciated.

[fireworker]

I can boot into Paragon recovery using the flash drive, but get stuck on the 2nd stage of recovery where the tab says “Backup selection”. How is this different from the 3rd tab that says “Source”?

On the 2nd tab you select backup files from where you will restore. On the 3rd - what exactly do you want to restore (disk, partition or any files)

I cannot see the external hard drives when plugged into any USB port.

Apparently on Recovery Media there is no necessary USB driver. What brand / model of your laptop?

If you have the correct backup, then you will restore your laptop to the state at the time of this backup, don't worry.

[aoz987]

if you have access to a second machine, to be able to re-create the recovery media, a suggestion is to use an external usb drive itself as recovery media, build the media, then copy the other IMAGE BACKUP to a subfolder.
thhis way when you boot, if it sees the usb drive like it sees the usb stick, it will have the IMAGE BACKUP on that same media

[JohnrC]

Thank you fireworker and aoz987.

I owe a clarification: scouring all the incremental backup files things looked OK. But on closer scrutiny I've found 1 tiny, buried file in each set that was corrupted/encrypted.

None of the restore problem was due to Paragon Backup & Restore. In fact, to my amazement, I have been able to restore at least one file even with the file corruption. Unfortunately, restoring others is proving challenging.

And Jeff in Paragon Support has been fantastic.

[aoz987]

going forward - when creating the image or file bckups - run the extra step of "check integrity", after the backup is created. this extgra step helps to verify that the actual image just created, is readable
and, my personal philosiphy is to do more FULL IMAGE backups, and less of the incrementals. this way i have more backups to go back to, if one of them would fail