# Fastest way to restore part of a backup

**URL:** https://forum.duplicati.com/t/fastest-way-to-restore-part-of-a-backup/10849
**Category:** Uncategorized
**Created:** [October 3, 2020, 1:34am UTC](https://forum.duplicati.com/t/fastest-way-to-restore-part-of-a-backup/10849 "2020-10-03T01:34:50Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 4

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### Author: ![ts678](https://forum.duplicati.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/8491ac/32.png) [@ts678](https://forum.duplicati.com/u/ts678)
#### Post date: [October 3, 2020, 6:55pm UTC](https://forum.duplicati.com/t/fastest-way-to-restore-part-of-a-backup/10849/4 "2020-10-03T18:55:58Z")

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[Restoring files if your Duplicati installation is lost](https://duplicati.readthedocs.io/en/latest/03-using-the-graphical-user-interface/#restoring-files-if-your-duplicati-installation-is-lost) is the standard path. It builds a custom partial temporary database. That should finish faster than a full database recreate which would have to make all files and all versions. You can point it at the downloaded backup files to gain a little extra speed from the local access.

You’re in somewhat strange territory if you’re downloading blocklist volumes, so I don’t know if the `Direct restore from backup files` would suffer the same fate of having to look for missing block information. Anything on the progress bar past 90% is the last exhaustive search for info that may or may not be found. Please record any error messages if it finishes with a complaint. We don’t want to do a rerun to get those.

> [@renoir789](#):
>
> I am trying to use the recovery tool, however am not successful in getting the syntax to restore just the one file I need.

I don’t know if I’ve done a partial before. I’ve done a complete, but I don’t know how much space you have. The help text says “Use the filters, --exclude, to perform a partial restore.”, but it crashes on me if exclude matches something. Possibly a bug, but what I was really hoping for you was that --include would work…

If you have another system, you can certainly try different methods in parallel to see which works, and fast.

EDIT:

My crash on --exclude match:

```plaintext
Using set 0 with timestamp 10/3/2020 1:14:33 PM
Building lookup table for file hashes
Index file has 5 hashes in total
Building lookup table with 4 entries, giving increments of 1
Computing restore path
Restoring 1 files to C:\tmp\RecoveryToolRestore
Removing common prefix C:\backup source\length1.txt\ from files
 error: System.ArgumentOutOfRangeException: startIndex cannot be larger than length of string.
Parameter name: startIndex
   at System.String.Substring(Int32 startIndex, Int32 length)
   at Duplicati.CommandLine.RecoveryTool.Restore.MapToRestorePath(String path, String prefixpath, String restorepath)
   at Duplicati.CommandLine.RecoveryTool.Restore.Run(List`1 args, Dictionary`2 options, IFilter filter)

```

I can avoid a crash (and have exclude work) by omitting --targetpath and letting it restore to original path. Information on the theory behind that (and the workaround that works here for that sort of crash) is [here](https://forum.duplicati.com/t/inconsistency-in-file-size-on-restore/2045/17). Depending on how different the desired path is from the undesired ones, it might be possible to exclude.

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