Abstract: 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.

Abstract: A computer-implemented method for efficiently backing up data may include (1) identifying a volume scheduled for a backup by a computing system, (2) determining that resource usage of the computing system will fall below a predetermined threshold for a period of time, (3) identifying at least one unit of data in the volume of data to copy to a backup image for the backup during the period of time, (4) in response to determining that the resource usage of the computing system will fall below the predetermined threshold for the period of time, copying the unit of data to the backup image during the period of time, (5) taking the snapshot of the volume, and (6) copying at least one additional unit of data from the snapshot to the backup image to make the backup image consistent with the snapshot. Various other methods, systems, and computer-readable media are also disclosed.

Abstract: 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.