Method and system for instant restore of system volume from a backup image

摘要

Techniques are disclosed for restoring a system volume on a computing system without requiring the system volume to be fully restored prior to being used or requiring the use of a dedicated recovery environment (e.g., the WinPE or BartPE environments). Instead, the computing system is booted directly from the restore image or by redirecting I/O interrupts to the restore image. That is, when user initiates a restore process, the system boots from the backup itself. Once booted, a background process can complete the restore process.

主权项

1. A computer-implemented method for restoring a system volume from a backup image, the method comprising:
prior to launching a boot loader on a computing system, receiving an indication to restore the system volume from the backup image; redirecting an interrupt associated with disk I/O to a redirector function configured to perform certain read operations directed to the system volume from the backup image, wherein the redirector function performs a read operation by either (i) reading data from the backup image and writing the data to the system volume being restored or (ii) reading data from the system volume; launching the boot loader, wherein the boot loader is configured to load an operating system stored in the backup image; and after the boot loader turns over control for disk I/O to the operating system, launching a disk filter driver configured to perform certain read operations directed to the system volume from the backup image and to perform write operations by writing to the system volume, wherein the disk filter driver performs a read operation directed to the system volume by either (i) reading data from the backup image and writing the data to the system volume being restored or (ii) reading data from the system volume, and wherein the disk filter driver is configured to complete restoring the system volume from the backup image by copying disk sectors from the backup image to the system volume.