Backup and recovery options in Windows 10

Historically, IT pros have relied on “wipe and load” as the solution for most issues with a Microsoft Windows device. Microsoft and third-party software developers have supplied a bumper crop of tools to make the process of creating enterprise images easy. Restore that image, and the user is on her way. That strategy works fine with devices that an organization owns, especially when those devices

are dedicated to straightforward roles and connected to the corporate network. If a desktop PC is having issues that don’t respond to quick troubleshooting, you can use your deployment environment to restore a standard image and then restore the user’s environment from the network. But modern businesses increasingly have a mix of managed and unmanaged devices, in the hands of an increasingly mobile workforce. Bringing a company-owned, managed device in to IT staff is not an option for a traveling employee, and unmanaged devices pose an additional set of problems in organizations that encourage workers to bring their own devices. For those situations, Windows 10 includes a set of recovery tools that a user (perhaps with assistance from the help desk) can use to perform common repair operations, up to and including a complete refresh of the default operating system. Windows 10 introduces major changes in the way the so-called “push-button reset” process works, eliminating the annoying problem of restoring an image that requires hours of updating before it’s useful and dramatically reducing the amount of space required as part of a standard install. For organizations that have a volume license agreement with Software Assurance, an additional, extremely powerful resource is available: the Microsoft Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset (DaRT).  This chapter discusses all of these recovery options. 
Using Windows Recovery Environment 
What happens when Windows 10 won’t start properly when you power on a PC or mobile device? The starting point for all repair and recovery options is Windows Recovery Environment (Windows RE), which includes a handful of essential tools for troubleshooting issues and repairing startup problems. You can start Windows RE from Windows 10 installation media, from a recovery drive, or from the recovery partition on a device, if that option is available. The initial Choose An Option menu allows the user to click Continue to attempt to start the default operating system without taking any further action.
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(This is the correct option if the system booted into Windows RE because of a transient issue that doesn’t need repair.) If multiple operating systems are installed on the computer, the Choose An Option menu might also display Use Another Operating System, which allows users to choose an alternative operating system to boot into. The Use A Device option allows a user to boot from a USB flash drive, DVD drive, or network boot server.  Clicking Troubleshoot opens the Troubleshoot screen, which displays options similar to those shown in Figure 9-1.  
FIGURE 9-1 When you start a Windows 10 device from recovery media, choose Troubleshoot to display these Windows Recovery Environment options.
You can use the first two Windows RE options to restore Windows 10 using the push-button reset feature. These options also are available from the Update & Recovery page in Settings, for use with systems that are able to start up properly. The Refresh and Reset options are covered fully later in this chapter.  The Reinstall option is new in Windows 10, as is Roll Back To The Previous Build. The latter option is available only if the current installation is an upgrade that saved the previous build’s files in the Windows.old folder. If you click Advanced Options, you’ll see a menu that resembles the one shown in Figure 9-2.
CHAPTER 9         Backup and recovery options in Windows 10         89 
FIGURE 9-2 This Windows RE menu provides access to essential troubleshooting and recovery tools.
Table 9-1 lists the functions available from the Advanced Options menu, many of which are direct descendants of recovery tools found in previous Windows editions. 
TABLE 9-1 Advanced options for recovery 
OPTION  DESCRIPTION 
System Restore  Allows you to choose a restore point created earlier and restore the system configuration.  System Image Recovery  Replaces everything on the computer with a system image created using the Windows Backup utility from Windows 7 or later. (In the April update to Windows 10 Technical Preview, this utility is available in the desktop Control Panel, via the System Image Backup link, at the bottom of the File History option.)  Startup Repair  If you choose this option, Windows attempts to diagnose and automatically correct common boot problems.  Command Prompt  Opens an administrative command prompt, where you can use command-line tools such as Bootrec and Bcdedit.  UEFI Firmware Settings Allows you to change startup settings such as boot device order and Secure Boot. On an older PC with a legacy BIOS, this option leads to the Startup Settings menu instead. 
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You can click Startup Repair to manually attempt the same set of repairs Windows uses when it detects a failure and launches Windows RE automatically. (This feature was previously called Automatic Repair.) System Image Recovery requires a previously saved image from an external storage device.  
The UEFI Firmware Settings menu restarts the system and allows you to change startup settings stored in the device’s firmware. Note that you can customize the Windows Recovery Environment as part of a standard image. I’ll provide more details on how to accomplish that task in the next edition of this book.
Windows 10 and push-button reset options
One revolutionary feature introduced in Windows 8 was a method of allowing end users to restore a clean copy of Windows without the need for separate installation media. When a computer has repeat problems and standard troubleshooting can’t uncover the cause, the traditional approach for most IT pros is to wipe the computer and restore it from a standard build image. The push-button reset options described here can accomplish the same result more quickly and without wiping out potentially valuable data.  On PCs that were originally purchased through retail channels running an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) version of Windows 8 or 8.1, the push-button reset recovery image is normally contained in a dedicated partition at the end of the hard drive. This recovery image can consist of a single image file or a set of split image files, with or without compression. You can recover the space used by that recovery partition on a PC running Windows 8.1, but doing so removes the ability to refresh or reset the operating system. In Windows 10, this recovery image and its associated partition are no longer required. Instead, Windows 10 accomplishes recovery operations by rebuilding the operating system to a clean state using existing system files.