Rapid Delta Restore

Macrium Rapid Delta Restore (RDR)

The concept of RDR has been something that has been thought about for quite some time here at Macrium Software. We were aware of competing technologies that offer fast restore capabilities but wanted to build something better.

Known state restore

This method performs a restore of an incremental image to a file system at a known state. The problem with this method is that the 'know state' must be prepared beforehand and the target disk cannot be accessed before the final 'rapid' restore. This means that the target disk for the restore cannot be the original 'live' disk and a previous restore of the same backup set must have been performed beforehand and the disk taken offline. Not very flexible.

Snapshot restore

Another method is to rely on an open Microsoft Volume Shadow copy Service (VSS) snapshot and use this to restore back to the state when the snapshot was created. Very quick, but only allows restoration back to the same disk and the image must have been created with VSS. Again, not flexible enough for real-world disaster recovery.

Macrium RDR

Where Macrium RDR differs is that it isn't dependent on VSS and a delta restore can be performed to any disk that has a previous copy of the imaged file system, no matter what its current state. This means that you can restore quickly back to the original disk, similar to the open snapshot method, and still have the flexibility to restore to a different disk that contains the same file system on it, in any state.