Windows Backup Access in Linux

Tutorials
1

This is a stub of a tutorial for now. I will add some screenshots and further info soon.

I’m still in my transition phase to Linux Mint, although I am almost exclusively logged into Mint on a daily basis. I’m still working through finding alternatives to my Win10 software or finding ways to running Win10 programs in Mint through WINE or PlayOnLinux.

However, I was cleaning up data on a bunch of backup drives and found some old Windows Backups that I wanted to restore so that I could see if there was anything of value there that had been lost in the PC transitions over the years. I tried using my Windows install but some of the backups are not accessible or fail to restore.

Luckily, with my trusty Linux Mint, I simply double clicked the Windows Backup archive and lo and behold, it just opened a folder and showed me all the ZIP files that it contained.
Then, I looked at the available programs in the Open With… option and found Double Commander. This little gem allowed me to simply select all the ZIP files and restore them to an external drive in one fell swoop.

Once I’ve restored all the files, I’ll use another little gem “dupeguru” which will allow me to analyze for duplicate files and I’ll be able to get back down to just what was valuable out of all that 3 Tb of backup files and disk images I had cluttering up one of my 5Tb drives.

2

Screenshot of my drive:

image
image803×179 10.4 KB

After right-clicking, I found Double Commander:

image
image805×292 28.7 KB

Here’s what you see when it opens up:
image

And further opening up the backup set shows the zip files:

image
image513×512 61.9 KB

Just select all the zip files and then right click to Extract Here which gives you the choice to select another drive and create a folder to do the extract into:
image

image

Then click OK to process the extract. It may take a while depending on how many zip files need to process.

2/17 update:
I’ve restored all the files from the backups that were accessible using Double Commander. I’m using DupeGuru to do the file comparisons to eliminate duplicates.
I’ve got one backup that was done with Norton that I’ll have to try to extract back in Win10, but I’ve generally recovered everything and just need to do further file cleanup.