How to Perform System State Recovery with Wbadmin?

Pros and cons of system state recovery

A system state backup is really helpful when your system settings collapse because of mis-operation, virus attack, malware, etc. It can restore your system settings to the state when the backup was taken, so your system will function normally.

A system state recovery can be performed when your system is offline or online, so it is the most efficient way to recover your system after a disaster. However, a system state backup cannot be counted as a full backup of your computer for it only contains boot files, active directory, cluster database, the registry and other system files. If your computer is in serious status that refuse to boot, a system state backup becomes useless.

System state restore from Wbadmin command line

You can use Windows Server Backup or WBadmin utility to perform a disaster recovery. For WBadmin, you can run the Wbadmin start systemstaterecovery command to restore your system state. To restore the system state from command line:

1. Open a command prompt with administrator privileges. Type “CMD” in the search box, right-click Command Prompt in the search results, and then click Run as administrator.

2. Type in a command based on the following syntax and press Enter to run a system state restore.

If you do not know the backup version, you can run the command “wbadmin get versions” to show the version identifier. The backup destination location can be a drive letter, a volume GUID-based path, or a remote shared folder path. If there are multiple computers backed up to a same location, you can use “-machine” switch to specify the server to be recovered. The “-quiet” switch means to run the backup without prompt.

For example, to restore a system state backup taken at 01:09 A.M. on 11/11/2015 that is saved on the shared folder \\192.168.0.221\Public\backup, use the following command:

As mentioned above, to only restore system state data might not be able to recover your Server from serious condition. To store your full Server more efficiently, you can try a third party program.

Restore system with AOMEI Backupper command line utility

The Server edition of AOMEI Backupper is specially designed for Windows Server, and it can also work with Windows PCs. With its advanced technology, AOMEI Backupper can run backup and restore in a fast speed while saving disk space. It can recover your server form either command line or graphic users interface (GUI) even when it is unbootable. Before performing a system restore, make sure you have created a system backup with AOMEI Backupper. To restore system to with AOMEI Backupper:

1. Open a command prompt. If your Server fails to boot, you can boot it from a bootable rescue media created by AOMEI Backupper.

2. Input the following command to navigate to AOMEI Backuper: cd [installation path of AOMEI Backupper] and press Enter. For example: cd C:\Program Files (x86) \AOMEI Backupper.

3. Run the following command to start restore:

If the backup is saved in remote share folder, you may need to enter user name and password in the form [/u "user name" /p "password"].

For example, to restore the system backup named system backup 10.adi that is saved in D:\system backup to partition 0 on disk 0, type the following:

To restore system backup saved in network share to the original location, run the following command:

Besides system state recovery, AOMEI Backupper can also be used to transfer system to dissimilar hardware, migrate OS to SSD, synchronize files in two folder, and more.