Differential backup problem

[azpmadmin]

Running BE 2012 on Windows 2008 server.

Just did a restore of a complete backup and now I want to do the differential.  Chose my last differential and it says 10.5 gb were backed up. 

Choose restore, files folders or volumes, file and folder backups,

I Resource view find the date and time of the backup I want to restore

Here is where it gets strange.    It shows ALL my folders and subfolders and all are unchecked.  It won't let me proceed until I check something to restore.  Shouldn't it only have what's been backed up since the last full and not everything??  How do I know what to choose?

[C-Ray]

What is the total amout of your full backup? If it is a differential, then select everything and proceed with the restore. A differential backup will backup ALL the changes since the last full. Incrementals only backup what has changed since the last backup, Full or incremental.

[Donald_Eady]

This is by design azpmadmin , 

              When you perform a restore of a box with 2012 you no longer need to restore Full, Inc, Inc etc...  or Full, Diff you can just choose the most current backup set be it Full Inc or Diff and it will pull or request the required media. So in your example rather than restore the full you should have simply selected the full server in the most current Differential backup, this would have pulled the full and diff and restored your box to the way it was at the time of the differential backup... minus any agents like exchange, sharepoint, etc.. these need to be done individually. Please see below 

 http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH195950

[azpmadmin]

Well that is certainly good to know, though not very intuitive.  Problem is, I restored 6tb of data during the full restore and can't afford the downtime to do it all again, especially for just 10gb of differential files.  Is there a way to see what files the differential backed up and just restore those?

[Colin_Weaver]

The file icons in the restore selections do look different if they were  backed up in a previous linked set - only problem with this in your case though is that you probably backed up a whole volume where files were changed all over the file/subfolder system so it would take ages to select them all.

Not sure if you can use the search option to filder by date, a very last option (that I have NOT tested for any negative effects, so use at your own risk) would be identify the catalog files for the full, move them out of the catalogs folder. Restart the BE services and I think the differential set will then only show it's files. Do your restore in this state, then put back the full catalog files and restart the BE services again.

[azpmadmin]

In just trying a simple restore of a file I identified through the different icon, after loading media BE goes into an active state but never actually restore anything.  It sat for 40 minutes before I cancelled the job and it was only a few mbs.  Help please!

[azpmadmin]

...

[Donald_Eady]

Is the restore coming from a tape or disk location?? If it is comming from tape please keep in mind that it has to stage both the full and differential sets before it can retrieve the request data and restore it. if this is the case please kick off the restore job again and allow it to run to completion/failure and report the result.