I have a 2012R2 Essentials machine I used to replace our 2008R2 Home Server some years ago. I attempted to install an A/V and it crashed and locked everything up. (Thanks Symantec) I've tried every which way I know to restore and learned a lot about wbadmin. (as a side note, deduplication can't be read on a windows 10 machine. You must have another server with the feature turned on. Otherwise, prepare for the long wait while the drive "rehydrates" start dedupjob...I digress)
At the moment, I've copied the HDD to a vhd as to not loose the original. I've installed a fresh copy of the essentials server and I'm attempting to restore. I see 5+ copies in Windows Server Backup. I select the date and time, the two volumes I want restored and the location on the exactly sized vhd to put them. When I hit restore I get "Windows Backup cannot find a shadow copy of the backup set on the storage location."
The backup drive was new, never touched when I began using it for backups. It has sat on the server for at least a year now with no changes. When attempting to bare metal restore, the backups can't be found. Wbadmin can't find the versions until I wbadmin restore catalog -backuptarget:d: Someone please help. I stand to possibly lose a decade of family pictures and home movies without restoration. This was the backup for the backup as it has been reliable for years...