Backup File Missing on External SSD After Using Rescuezilla

[Anonymous]

First time using Rescuezilla, and something really strange is happening. I backed up my internal SSD to an external SSD, which took about an hour. Everything seemed fine—no errors or issues—and I even verified the backup file successfully.

However, after restarting my PC, I checked the external SSD, and the backup file was gone! The drive initially showed as empty, with 0 GB used. After restarting the PC again, the external SSD showed some space as being used, but the backup file still doesn’t appear.

I’ve tried using tools like WinDirStat, enabling hidden and protected files, and other troubleshooting steps, but I can’t locate the file.

I repeated the backup process twice, and each time there were no errors during the process, but the same result occurred.

[Anonymous]

Sorry for the double post, but I'm using Windows 11

[Rescuezilla]

Sorry for replying 7 days late to your issue.

The biggest thing I can imagine is you're backing up not to your target SSD (/mnt/backup), but to a different path within Rescuezilla's non-persistent environment.

All changes made to the Rescuezilla operating system reside in RAM -- a non-persistent environment and disappear upon restart.

If you have eg, 32GB of RAM it's possible for a backup of a fresh Windows system to fit into the non-persistent RAM environment, if you select the wrong target location. It would perhaps not be obvious selecting the wrong destination if your external SSD contains no files. But the user-interface around selecting the destination disk makes this difficult, but it may be possible with a few clicks to change the destination away from /mnt/backup.

Another possibility is Rescuezilla (or your SSD) failed to synchronize the files that were written, because both drives like SSDs and operating systems can use temporary storage to speed up transfers. But this seems very unlikely -- Rescuezilla runs the sync command internally to flush all the buffers to disk after the operation, and if you shutdown using a normal shutdown request mechanism that Rescuezilla can react to (eg, start menu or quick press of power button) then the operating system will also flush everything and eject disks.

The only other related thing I can imagine is your SSD having an internal temporary storage that it needs to flush to persistent storage, but since it's an SSD not a mechanical hard drive this also seems unlikely.

Happy to hear further experiences. What's make/model of your SSD by the way?