I was amalgamating all of my old backups oneto a single USB drive when I stumbled on a DVD from 2006 that had a large file named “Web1-Primary_BU_Mar12_06.bkf” . After a few minutes of thinking I remembered that .BKF stands for BacKup File and remembered that “Windows Backup” had been deprecated and removed from Windows in the Vista (2007-ish) time frame. So that lead to the question of how to restore this old .BKF file using a Windows 10 PC.
There are several tools you can buy to do this but that seems silly because I remember that NT Backup (aka Windows Backup) is an almost self contained portable app. You can download NT Backup directly from Microsoft HERE but if you do that will find that it is missing a required file vssapi.dll from 2002! You will get:
“The ordinal 3 could not be located in the dynamic link library”
I found a copy of that file on a dodgy download site but I was able to scan it with several tools and found no problems. After adding that file to NT5Backup folder all was well and I could open the .BKF file then perform a full restore without any problems, payments or data loss.
To save you the time I have bundled up NT5Backup and vssapi.dll so you can download the full package easily right here.
Below is a video explaining the download and usage process:
7 Comments
john · October 25, 2023 at 11:47 am
great job. lol how did we ever live with the fixed window size using NTBackup ?
Simon · November 21, 2021 at 4:36 pm
Nice work. Thanks.
Elliot · September 29, 2021 at 11:41 am
Hi, I tried what you suggested. When I got into the Wizard and put in my file, I got the error message: “The backup file contains unrecognized data and cannot be used.” Is there any hope for opening this file?
Ian Matthews · October 5, 2021 at 3:51 pm
Hi Elliot;
We have not seen that before. I wonder if the file is corruptor if it is from an even older version of Windows Backup.
Thoughts?
Elliot · October 6, 2021 at 7:22 pm
I tried opening the file in an old XP laptop. This time it said it could not open the file without knowing what it was written in. It gave me a list including Works, Mozilla Firefox, Adobe and a few others. None of them worked. All I know is it was Family Tree Maker.
Thomas · June 7, 2021 at 1:49 am
Thank you very much. You saved my day. Your backup-bundle works perfect.
Ian Matthews · June 7, 2021 at 1:29 pm
Hi Thomas; I am glad it helped 🙂