ShadowProtect Desktop 3 is out... [Archive]

Peter2150

August 22nd, 2007, 12:03 PM

-{ Quote: "Had never issues with ver. 2 ,but also curious about universal restore,buy me a new vista rig and replace this vista stuff with an image of my good old XP install,what are the cranckles and hooks with this option i don't know,maybe Pete have something to say about this." }-

HIR will work, but, there is a caveat. HIR's purpose is to get the computer to boot. Won't necessarily work that well. Once booted, then you have to update drivers, etc to polish it off.

If you can you'd be smarter to buy a rig that already has XP on it.

WHen I tested the HIR I was amazed at what it could do, but still system's are rough after initial restore.

I have two desktops, one AMD and one Intel. I cross installed images. Also I have a pentium 4 laptop with promise raid, and I restored it on the desktops. So it does work, so long as you understand the objective.

Pete

huntnyc

August 22nd, 2007, 12:14 PM

I am about to purchase upgrade to 3.0 desktop but am thinking is it worth getting 1 year maintainence plan on this. Anyone bought that opition or think it is better no to and why. Thanks.

Gary

aigle

August 22nd, 2007, 12:18 PM

Can u give some details about how fast it is? Some numbers etc.

Thanks-{ Quote: "I just purchased/downloaded a copy (BIG download... 318 MB.) I only run SP as a boot CD environment. After burning the ISO, I gave it a quick test. Worked great! I chose to boot into the Vista environment (not legacy.) Some nice, new options like CD/DVD burning and image verification. Even hardware independent restoration!

Overall, I'm very pleased. I'll be doing a few more tests in the coming days (like trying out the DVD burner etc.)

http://www.storagecraft.com/products/ShadowProtectDesktop/" }-

ErikAlbert

August 22nd, 2007, 12:40 PM

I'm not going to upgrade. SP v2 is good enough and I only need it for my system partition. I don't need SP under Windows anymore.

ErikAlbert

August 22nd, 2007, 12:45 PM

-{ Quote: "Can u give some details about how fast it is? Some numbers etc.

Thanks" }-
My system partition = 11.4gb and I use only the Recovery CD.
Backup time = close to 4 minuts. Restore-time = close to 6 minuts.
The loading time of the Recovery CD = 3m30s.
ShadowProtect Desktop v3 = close to $80

sukarof

August 22nd, 2007, 01:33 PM

-{ Quote: "Can u give some details about how fast it is? Some numbers etc.

Thanks" }-

I just installed it in Vista. 17 minutes for a full backup of my C drive 35GB @35MB/s (in the background while using the computer as usual).

I havent restored yet though, but looking at the history of Shadowprotect (in my machine at least) I have no doubt what so ever it wont work.
Now I am just waiting for my new serial so I can activate it in Vista. I have the one year maintenance.
And fyi (http://forums.storagecraft.com/Forums/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=653)to anyone has bought the one year maintenance : We will get a email within a week with the product key and a link to the new ISO file.
No worries :thumb:

Peter2150

August 22nd, 2007, 01:34 PM

-{ Quote: "I am about to purchase upgrade to 3.0 desktop but am thinking is it worth getting 1 year maintainence plan on this. Anyone bought that opition or think it is better no to and why. Thanks.

Gary" }-

I did. Gets you all updates and upgrades. So if you had bought 2.0 around this time last year, you'd have gotten 2.5 and now 3.0.

I think it's worth it.

Peter2150

August 22nd, 2007, 01:37 PM

-{ Quote: "I'm not going to upgrade. SP v2 is good enough and I only need it for my system partition. I don't need SP under Windows anymore." }-

You might want to rethink that. The new recoverey disk(assuming you aren't using nvidia raid) loads in about half the time, and also the restore times are shorter.

screamer

August 22nd, 2007, 01:43 PM

Pete,

Is there anything special I need to do w/ re: to FD-ISR & Raid 0?

...screamer

Edit: nVidia Raid 0

Huupi

August 22nd, 2007, 01:53 PM

-{ Quote: "You might want to rethink that. The new recoverey disk(assuming you aren't using nvidia raid) loads in about half the time, and also the restore times are shorter." }-

I,m using SP for more then a year, up until now i never got it to work on my main rig,have no complaints because the recovery disk is reliable and very fast and as Pete said version 3 recovery environment is all the more faster,so i got to scrape some money together to get version 3 !

Horus37

August 22nd, 2007, 01:56 PM

I'm wondering if it would be wise to get the service for 1 year because I'm assuming that when xp service pack 3 and Vista service pack one comes out it might change the 2 so much that a newer version of ShadowProtect will be needed above newly released version 3?

grnxnm

August 22nd, 2007, 02:06 PM

-{ Quote: "You might want to rethink that. The new recoverey disk(assuming you aren't using nvidia raid) loads in about half the time, and also the restore times are shorter." }-

For you guys with nForce chipsets, use the "Legacy" environment when booting the recovery CD. This "Legacy" environment isn't really old, it's just based on Windows Server 2003 rather than Vista, and has better support for nForce. Microsoft shipped crap drivers for nForce with Vista-WinPE (upon which the "Recommended" environment is based). You should have no disk or network issues with nForce as long as you use the Legacy environment.

HAN

August 22nd, 2007, 02:42 PM

-{ Quote: "Can u give some details about how fast it is? Some numbers etc.

Thanks" }-

I'll post back later today with more info... :)

lodore

August 22nd, 2007, 04:26 PM

so can the version3 recovery cd reconize any nvidia chipset?
inculding 650i and 680i?
because when i get a new computer at christmas if i want to use a winpe cd with paragon i will need a new iso from paragon with the 650i or 680i chipset drivers on it.
but if i buy shadow protect desktop for that computer i can just burn the iso to disc and use it.
lodore

aigle

August 22nd, 2007, 04:32 PM

@Peter
@Sukarof

Thanks for the details.

Peter2150

August 22nd, 2007, 04:43 PM

-{ Quote: "so can the version3 recovery cd reconize any nvidia chipset?
inculding 650i and 680i?
because when i get a new computer at christmas if i want to use a winpe cd with paragon i will need a new iso from paragon with the 650i or 680i chipset drivers on it.
but if i buy shadow protect desktop for that computer i can just burn the iso to disc and use it.
lodore" }-

Hi Lodore

Haven't got v3 of desktop yet, but v3 of the IT edition should cover all the nvidia chipsets. I've tested it on the 590 and 680 flavor's and it works fine.

My advice would be unless you need to buy now, to wait, but if you need to buy new, I think Shadowprotect would be a good bet.

Pete

Huupi

August 22nd, 2007, 04:43 PM

-{ Quote: "HIR will work, but, there is a caveat. HIR's purpose is to get the computer to boot. Won't necessarily work that well. Once booted, then you have to update drivers, etc to polish it off.

If you can you'd be smarter to buy a rig that already has XP on it.

WHen I tested the HIR I was amazed at what it could do, but still system's are rough after initial restore.

I have two desktops, one AMD and one Intel. I cross installed images. Also I have a pentium 4 laptop with promise raid, and I restored it on the desktops. So it does work, so long as you understand the objective.

Pete" }-

After searching high and low all over the web,i realised here in Europe there are no XP machines left to buy,everything is Vista,so the dictate from uncle Bill is very well taken by the industry.

lodore

August 22nd, 2007, 05:05 PM

-{ Quote: "Hi Lodore

Haven't got v3 of desktop yet, but v3 of the IT edition should cover all the nvidia chipsets. I've tested it on the 590 and 680 flavor's and it works fine.

My advice would be unless you need to buy now, to wait, but if you need to buy new, I think Shadowprotect would be a good bet.

Pete" }-
Hi peter,
thanks for the info.
i can probaly get paragon to make me a new iso with the right drivers on it.
and that will save me $80 or £40.
im not sure which i will do yet since i like the idea of doing incremental images every 15mins to a second hard drive.
or even hourly would do.
but im sure i can set paragon to do on a schdule.
lodore

grnxnm

August 22nd, 2007, 05:24 PM

-{ Quote: "so can the version3 recovery cd reconize any nvidia chipset?
inculding 650i and 680i?
because when i get a new computer at christmas if i want to use a winpe cd with paragon i will need a new iso from paragon with the 650i or 680i chipset drivers on it.
but if i buy shadow protect desktop for that computer i can just burn the iso to disc and use it.
lodore" }-

Yes. When you boot the ShadowProtect Desktop/Server 3.0 Recovery Environment CD, at the start of the boot process select to boot the "Legacy" environment rather than the "Recommended" environment. The legacy environment is based on windows server 2003 and has been thoroughly tested for proper nForce storage and network driver support.

Horus37

August 22nd, 2007, 05:33 PM

The question still stands then, "Would it be worth it to buy the 1 yr service/maint for Shadowprotect now with ver 3 when XP sp3 and vista sp1 on the horizon? With these changes predicted in the 2 service packs, will it change so much that a newer version of shadow protect be needed and if so will that happen in less than 1 year?" Anyone have a handle on when these service packs will hit the market? Perhaps I'll ask storagecraft....

tradetime

August 22nd, 2007, 05:36 PM

-{ Quote: "After searching high and low all over the web,i realised here in Europe there are no XP machines left to buy,everything is Vista,so the dictate from uncle Bill is very well taken by the industry." }-
Custom configurations are available here with XP.
http://www.cyberpowersystem.co.uk/

lodore

August 22nd, 2007, 05:47 PM

-{ Quote: "Yes. When you boot the ShadowProtect Desktop/Server 3.0 Recovery Environment CD, at the start of the boot process select to boot the "Legacy" environment rather than the "Recommended" environment. The legacy environment is based on windows server 2003 and has been thoroughly tested for proper nForce storage and network driver support." }-
thanks grnxnmm.
i find it a bit annoying the price has gone up from $70 to $80 but oh welll.
i will have to work out if i will buy it or not.
it will cut £40 out of my new computer fund.
lodore

grnxnm

August 22nd, 2007, 05:52 PM

-{ Quote: "thanks grnxnmm.
i find it a bit annoying the price has gone up from $70 to $80 but oh welll.
i will have to work out if i will buy it or not.
it will cut £40 out of my new computer fund.
lodore" }-

Please don't buy it if the price is not justified for your particular needs. There are a lot of backup products out there, as you're well aware. Maybe you can find something for less that works just fine for you. I'd love to have a Porsche, they're great cars, but I don't need one nor can I afford the price. I drive a Honda Accord. ;)

Huupi

August 22nd, 2007, 05:58 PM

-{ Quote: "Custom configurations are available here with XP.
http://www.cyberpowersystem.co.uk/" }-

Thanks Trade Time, but i'm living in holland and here is absolutely nothing like cyberpowersytem,only preinstalled OEM machines with Vista on it.Thats the fate to live in such a small country with such a small market.

Huupi

August 22nd, 2007, 06:13 PM

I got sick from this ongoing squabble about prices,just take it or leave it !!!

Peter2150

August 22nd, 2007, 06:14 PM

-{ Quote: "The question still stands then, "Would it be worth it to buy the 1 yr service/maint for Shadowprotect now with ver 3 when XP sp3 and vista sp1 on the horizon? With these changes predicted in the 2 service packs, will it change so much that a newer version of shadow protect be needed and if so will that happen in less than 1 year?" Anyone have a handle on when these service packs will hit the market? Perhaps I'll ask storagecraft...." }-

With the maintenance pack,it won't matter. You will get any upgrades and updates.

Pete

Huupi

August 22nd, 2007, 06:19 PM

lodore

August 22nd, 2007, 06:38 PM

-{ Quote: "Hi Lodore this thread is not about money,we should have a nice talk about SP,and the way it can benefit us !!!" }-
Hi Huupi,
i know its a great product but its just a bit annoying the price went up for version 3
I like the new features of the product thou.
being a student i have a limited budget for a computer and buying new software is money out of it.
i might email paragon and see if they can make me a new winpe iso once i know what motherboard chipset im getting.
if this pc was for the whole family i would buy the shadow protect desktop myself but since im buying the pc im not so sure about reducing my pc budget.
i might buy it at a later stage thou.
lodore

ErikAlbert

August 22nd, 2007, 06:54 PM

Iodore,
Christmas is coming ... give you parents a hint ... it happens all the time.

nexstar

August 22nd, 2007, 07:12 PM

-{ Quote: "Hi Huupi,
i know its a great product but its just a bit annoying the price went up for version 3
" }-
Be grateful they didn't price it by the megabyte:o .
Graham

Peter2150

August 22nd, 2007, 07:27 PM

-{ Quote: "Be grateful they didn't price it by the megabyte:o .
Graham" }-

Is a big one isn't it:D

Acadia

August 22nd, 2007, 07:34 PM

-{ Quote: "Please don't buy it if the price is not justified for your particular needs. There are a lot of backup products out there, as you're well aware. Maybe you can find something for less that works just fine for you. I'd love to have a Porsche, they're great cars, but I don't need one nor can I afford the price. I drive a Honda Accord. ;)" }-
Boy, is this honesty or what?! 8) My hat's off to grnxnm for that statement, how many support people from other companies would make a similar statement? I find this very refreshing.

Acadia

aigle

August 22nd, 2007, 07:42 PM

This statement might not be difficult as SP is mainly aimed to corporate people. I doubt taht he will make same statement to his potential corporate customers.:)

HAN

August 22nd, 2007, 10:14 PM

Ok. I ran a few more tests... (remember that I run SP by boot CD environment only.)

I imaged drive C two ways. First by DVD. This is new for SP as version 2 did not support direct burning from within the program. 11.5 GB on drive C burned to two DVD+R disks in 15 minutes 49 seconds. IMO, this was amazingly fast. It's been a while but with Image for DOS (my previous choice before SP), it was at least 30 minutes or more.

My second image was to my Western Digital Portable USB 2 drive. This time, 11.5 GB imaged to the HD in 6 minutes 40 seconds. I can't remember what SP version 2 was earlier to this HD but I'm pretty sure it was not less. So the speed to a HD is still excellent.

Lastly, I tried out the image verification routine (which was not part of the GUI prior to version 3.) I tried two different verifications. First, I verified a previous, smaller image I'd made under version 2. No problems. Then I verified tonight's image. It took 4 minutes 30 seconds and I had no issues with it either.

I have yet to test an actual restoration but I will do that sometime tomorrow.

Later... ;)

Peter2150

August 22nd, 2007, 11:54 PM

Ran my first image tonight also. Imaged from the desktop, and verified from the desktop. Restore is running right now.

When I was testing the IT edition, I imaged to and restored from DVD's. Worked fine, and I see no reason this would be different.

Need to take a break tomorrow and put Vista, back on, but then next is an HIR test with this version, and then start up the continous incrementals.

Looks great.

While maybe not to home users, but this continuous incremental and image manager sure would seem to justify the extra cost.

kennyboy

August 23rd, 2007, 04:09 AM

-{ Quote: "Ran my first image tonight also. Imaged from the desktop, and verified from the desktop. Restore is running right now.

When I was testing the IT edition, I imaged to and restored from DVD's. Worked fine, and I see no reason this would be different.

Need to take a break tomorrow and put Vista, back on, but then next is an HIR test with this version, and then start up the continous incrementals.

Looks great.

While maybe not to home users, but this continuous incremental and image manager sure would seem to justify the extra cost." }-

Peter, you are just trying to make me jealous.........and you've succeeded...hahaha
Wish I could just buy the recovery cd as I think this would be sufficient for a lot of potential users.

aigle

August 23rd, 2007, 07:29 AM

I used trial just to check the speed. Like version 2 on my system, it was not much faster than ATI version 7, just a diference of 1 min or even less!

aigle

August 23rd, 2007, 07:29 AM

-{ Quote: "Ok. I ran a few more tests... (remember that I run SP by boot CD environment only.)

I imaged drive C two ways. First by DVD. This is new for SP as version 2 did not support direct burning from within the program. 11.5 GB on drive C burned to two DVD+R disks in 15 minutes 49 seconds. IMO, this was amazingly fast. It's been a while but with Image for DOS (my previous choice before SP), it was at least 30 minutes or more.

My second image was to my Western Digital Portable USB 2 drive. This time, 11.5 GB imaged to the HD in 6 minutes 40 seconds. I can't remember what SP version 2 was earlier to this HD but I'm pretty sure it was not less. So the speed to a HD is still excellent.

Lastly, I tried out the image verification routine (which was not part of the GUI prior to version 3.) I tried two different verifications. First, I verified a previous, smaller image I'd made under version 2. No problems. Then I verified tonight's image. It took 4 minutes 30 seconds and I had no issues with it either.

I have yet to test an actual restoration but I will do that sometime tomorrow.

Later... ;)" }-
Thanks Han.

silver0066

August 23rd, 2007, 10:00 AM

-{ Quote: "Please don't buy it if the price is not justified for your particular needs. There are a lot of backup products out there, as you're well aware. Maybe you can find something for less that works just fine for you. I'd love to have a Porsche, they're great cars, but I don't need one nor can I afford the price. I drive a Honda Accord. ;)" }-I just bought it. ShadowProtect is the Porsche, Acronis TrueImage Workstation with UR is the poor running old Chevy.

huntnyc

August 23rd, 2007, 10:05 AM

-{ Quote: "I just bought it. ShadowProtect is the Porsche, Acronis TrueImage Workstation with UR is the poor running old Chevy." }-

I second that. Running here smoothly and love the new features. Still lean and mean program.

Recovery CD boots much faster and allowed me to plug in external USB drive after I had booted and it picked it up with no problem. I could not do that with previous recovery CD without restarting it again.

Gary

alfa1

August 23rd, 2007, 10:36 AM

What about intel P35 chipset and Jmicron controller? :blink:
Are they reconized by the recovery CD or is it required a special procedure?

Txs in advance... :)

Peter2150

August 23rd, 2007, 12:13 PM

-{ Quote: "What about intel P35 chipset and Jmicron controller? :blink:
Are they reconized by the recovery CD or is it required a special procedure?

Txs in advance... :)" }-

Hard to say. Wait until grnxnm comes along. Or request the evaluation edition and give it a whirl.

Silver I'd have to agree with you.

Pete

grnxnm

August 23rd, 2007, 02:44 PM

-{ Quote: "What about intel P35 chipset and Jmicron controller? :blink:
Are they reconized by the recovery CD or is it required a special procedure?

Txs in advance... :)" }-

As a general guideline, if the chipset/storage-controller is natively supported by Vista, then it will be supported in the Recommended recovery environment without the need for you to load additional drivers. However, this is a generalization because we've added many drivers to the base configuration. I'll have to find the list for you. Like the others say, just request the full eval so that you can download the ISO for the recovery environment, burn a CD based on the ISO image, and boot it and see if you can see your disks properly (even in RAID configurations) in the new Disk Map tab. If you can't see your disks, no problem, just click on the Tools menu and select Load Drivers and point it to the .INF file (say on a USB thumb drive, or on a network share - use Network Configuration to map drive letters within the recovery environment) for your storage controller. In fact you can load other drivers here too, such as NIC drivers if they're not included in the recovery environment.

aigle

August 23rd, 2007, 07:38 PM

I don,t find any options for MBR, Track Zero etc during imaging. Where are these options?

grnxnm

August 23rd, 2007, 09:17 PM

-{ Quote: "I don,t find any options for MBR, Track Zero etc during imaging. Where are these options?" }-

Those are options in a page in the restore wizard.

aigle

August 23rd, 2007, 09:21 PM

So while taking an image, everything is imaged by default?
Can u restore a standard MBR( instead of imaged one) while restoring?

ErikAlbert

August 23rd, 2007, 09:26 PM

-{ Quote: "So while taking an image, everything is imaged by default?
Can u restore a standard MBR( instead of imaged one) while restoring?" }-
Yes and yes.

aigle

August 23rd, 2007, 09:30 PM

-{ Quote: "Yes and yes." }-
Ok, Ok, Thanks;D ;D

Karen76

August 23rd, 2007, 11:00 PM

Having waited for months, I was delighted to learn the Vista-compatible version of ShadowProtect was finally released. I just downloaded and installed the trial version of SP v3. Several seconds after commencing a backup image of my C drive, my new Vista PC experienced its first BSOD. There were some ominous warning messages, the system shutdown then restarted, and my normally-silent PC issued a terrible noise unlike anything I'd ever heard.

Apparently, there's a conflict between ShadowProtect and some other software on my PC, possibly Seagate DiscWizard (a stripped down version of Acronis True Image v10). I rebooted into a different FirstDefense-ISR snapshot to erase any trace of SP. Having read so many glowing reports about ShadowProtect, I was looking forward to seeing how it worked for myself. Since I hope to never hear that godawful sound from my PC again, I think I'll pass on any further experimentation. I've experienced plenty of software conflicts but never one as extreme, and loud, as this one.

screamer

August 23rd, 2007, 11:13 PM

Does anyone have ATI & SP on the same box / partition?

...screamer

HAN

August 23rd, 2007, 11:39 PM

Did some restores tonight...

Hard drive based went totally as expected. (Setup listed in post #37.) Time? 5 minutes and 15 seconds. A bit faster than version 2 was. Very cool! :)

DVD was a bit different. :( While it did appear to restore drive C, it apparently would not restore the MBR. I tried 4 times from 2 different images. 3 times under the recommended (Vista) environment and 1 under the legacy version (which BTW, took MUCH longer to run than the Vista version.) The error message I received each time was "Failed to restore MBR! Continue the volume restoration?" (To be clear, the restoration did continue (and finish) all 4 times.)

With this all said, it makes me wonder if the DVD imaging/burning routine really does support MBR restoration, even though the option is listed in the restore environment? I very briefly looked through the version 3 SP Desktop User Guide and didn't find anything.

grnxnm, any thoughts? (I have not went to Storage Craft support yet.)

Peter2150

August 24th, 2007, 12:04 AM

Peter2150

August 24th, 2007, 12:08 AM

-{ Quote: "Does anyone have ATI & SP on the same box / partition?

...screamer" }-

They may conflict depending on what Acronis is doing for it's hot imaging.

Pete

JimInVA

August 24th, 2007, 02:15 AM

While working on a new system and its software installation, an attempt that I'd made at merging some software from a previous system did not produce the desired results. Because I'd installed SP Desktop 3 immediately after the initial XP install... and because I'd made a couple of full backups at various point... I decided that it was time to see how easily a restore operation would go.

Now I must admit that my first inclination was to restore to another hard drive, test it and to then image that to the NVIDIA Raid-0 array... but seriously... if I won't trust the software, then I really shouldn't be using it to begin with. So I initialized the array and began the recovery process. I clicked to start the process and turned to find my cup of coffee. Returning to the system, I continued wait... and wait... and WAIT. At some point, I actually began to read the information on the display before me and saw the word "COMPLETED". In the short couple of minutes that I'd used to chase down some coffee, it had already completed. 9.5GB in 2M/11s. Not just nice... but VERY NICE!!

I've owned my own computer store for 20 years. I've seen so many things over so long a period of time that I can't even remember when the last time some new piece of software was worth much more than the raise of an eyebrow. All I can say is that I'm glad it was after midnight so no one was around to see me hooting and hollering and dancing around the shop! This is some very good stuff!!

Jim

ErikAlbert

August 24th, 2007, 02:35 AM

-{ Quote: "Does anyone have ATI & SP on the same box / partition?

...screamer" }-
Yes I had ATI & SP in the same box under winXPproSP2 and they don't like eachother.
My computer suddenly rebooted while I was doing a backup with SP and it happened regularly, not just one time and without any error message, no BSOD, nothing, just a reboot.
First I thought it was SP, but after uninstalling ATI completely, everything was back to normal.
At least one member at Wilders had the same experience, but I don't remember his name.

Huupi

August 24th, 2007, 05:31 AM

-{ Quote: "While working on a new system and its software installation, an attempt that I'd made at merging some software from a previous system did not produce the desired results. Because I'd installed SP Desktop 3 immediately after the initial XP install... and because I'd made a couple of full backups at various point... I decided that it was time to see how easily a restore operation would go.

Now I must admit that my first inclination was to restore to another hard drive, test it and to then image that to the NVIDIA Raid-0 array... but seriously... if I won't trust the software, then I really shouldn't be using it to begin with. So I initialized the array and began the recovery process. I clicked to start the process and turned to find my cup of coffee. Returning to the system, I continued wait... and wait... and WAIT. At some point, I actually began to read the information on the display before me and saw the word "COMPLETED". In the short couple of minutes that I'd used to chase down some coffee, it had already completed. 9.5GB in 2M/11s. Not just nice... but VERY NICE!!

I've owned my own computer store for 20 years. I've seen so many things over so long a period of time that I can't even remember when the last time some new piece of software was worth much more than the raise of an eyebrow. All I can say is that I'm glad it was after midnight so no one was around to see me hooting and hollering and dancing around the shop! This is some very good stuff!!

Jim" }-

Hi Jim, Welcome on board ! A question,did you restore the system part. with the recovery disk,or you restored just a data partition from within windows ?
I admit restore time is amasing compared with vers. 2,but from other members their experiences i read,recovery times are just a LITTLE faster.It would be nice if you already had vers. 2,so you could compare,But as you said its a new rig so its not possible

JimInVA

August 24th, 2007, 06:28 AM

-{ Quote: "Hi Jim, Welcome on board ! A question,did you restore the system part. with the recovery disk,or you restored just a data partition from within windows ?
I admit restore time is amasing compared with vers. 2,but from other members their experiences i read,recovery times are just a LITTLE faster.It would be nice if you already had vers. 2,so you could compare,But as you said its a new rig so its not possible" }-

Thanks for the Welcome! Been lurking and learning... some very talented folks have been willing to discuss, challenge and be challenged with their ideas. I have learned much!

I did a Volume Restore from the CD. I did note one interesting item, however. Before electing to move directly to the main Raid-0 array (138GB), I did ask the software to look at an 80GB drive. This would have more than enough size for the 9.5GBs of the image. SP insisted, however, that the image was 138GB and disallowed access to the smaller drive for not having enough available storage.

This raises an issue of concern - If my primary had been a 750GB drive(s) and the entire data population of the drive was only 100GBs. I'd have hoped (and expected) that I could use a smaller drive (say a 120GB) as a restore destination. This would allow me a quick return to operation while I pursued a larger replacement. I'm now wondering if there was another option available to me that I didn't notice.

I have both SP 2.5 and 3.0 but had only used the 2.5 in trial mode for backups. If time allows later in the week, I might try them both and note difference in image sizes and backup/restore times...

Jim

Huupi

August 24th, 2007, 08:24 AM

-{ Quote: "Thanks for the Welcome! Been lurking and learning... some very talented folks have been willing to discuss, challenge and be challenged with their ideas. I have learned much!

I did a Volume Restore from the CD. I did note one interesting item, however. Before electing to move directly to the main Raid-0 array (138GB), I did ask the software to look at an 80GB drive. This would have more than enough size for the 9.5GBs of the image. SP insisted, however, that the image was 138GB and disallowed access to the smaller drive for not having enough available storage.

This raises an issue of concern - If my primary had been a 750GB drive(s) and the entire data population of the drive was only 100GBs. I'd have hoped (and expected) that I could use a smaller drive (say a 120GB) as a restore destination. This would allow me a quick return to operation while I pursued a larger replacement. I'm now wondering if there was another option available to me that I didn't notice.

I have both SP 2.5 and 3.0 but had only used the 2.5 in trial mode for backups. If time allows later in the week, I might try them both and note difference in image sizes and backup/restore times...

Jim" }-

Hey Jim,at time of backup,did you cover free space included in the backup,if so SP always calculate the destination space against backup space,if they don't match,SP fire up the message.Its mostly useless to backup freespace,you get an image with lots of air so to speak.But its my guess,maybe the Gurus can jump in.

Peter2150

August 24th, 2007, 08:28 AM

-{ Quote: "Thanks for the Welcome! Been lurking and learning... some very talented folks have been willing to discuss, challenge and be challenged with their ideas. I have learned much!

I did a Volume Restore from the CD. I did note one interesting item, however. Before electing to move directly to the main Raid-0 array (138GB), I did ask the software to look at an 80GB drive. This would have more than enough size for the 9.5GBs of the image. SP insisted, however, that the image was 138GB and disallowed access to the smaller drive for not having enough available storage.

This raises an issue of concern - If my primary had been a 750GB drive(s) and the entire data population of the drive was only 100GBs. I'd have hoped (and expected) that I could use a smaller drive (say a 120GB) as a restore destination. This would allow me a quick return to operation while I pursued a larger replacement. I'm now wondering if there was another option available to me that I didn't notice.

I have both SP 2.5 and 3.0 but had only used the 2.5 in trial mode for backups. If time allows later in the week, I might try them both and note difference in image sizes and backup/restore times...

Jim" }-

Hi Jim

Currently ShadowProtect doesn't have shrink on the fly so you are right you can't restore the bigger partition on a smaller drive. In testing HIR what I did was shrink the partition with Acronis Disk Director first and then image it. Then no problem. Note right now the issue HAN mentioned about restoring the mbr. Image is good, but there is that little nit, that should be fixed ASAP.

Pete

JimInVA

August 24th, 2007, 08:45 AM

-{ Quote: "Hey Jim,at time of backup,did you cover free space included in the backup,if so SP always calculate the destination space against backup space,if they don't match,SP fire up the message.Its mostly useless to backup freespace,you get an image with lots of air so to speak.But its my guess,maybe the Gurus can jump in." }-

As I recall, the default was to NOT save free space. The complete image was only 4 GBs.

Jim

screamer

August 24th, 2007, 03:50 PM

-{ Quote: "Yes I had ATI & SP in the same box under winXPproSP2 and they don't like eachother.
My computer suddenly rebooted while I was doing a backup with SP and it happened regularly, not just one time and without any error message, no BSOD, nothing, just a reboot.
First I thought it was SP, but after uninstalling ATI completely, everything was back to normal.
At least one member at Wilders had the same experience, but I don't remember his name." }-

Thanks Erik, I'll uninstall ATI if I get the eval. of SP ver.3

...screamer

ErikAlbert

August 24th, 2007, 04:04 PM

-{ Quote: "Thanks Erik, I'll uninstall ATI if I get the eval. of SP ver.3

...screamer" }-
You might keep your ATI-backup-files and use the Acronis Rescue CD to recover your system, just in case you are in trouble with SP.
But you have to uninstall ATI under Windows.

grnxnm

August 24th, 2007, 04:19 PM

-{ Quote: "Did some restores tonight...

Hard drive based went totally as expected. (Setup listed in post #37.) Time? 5 minutes and 15 seconds. A bit faster than version 2 was. Very cool! :)

DVD was a bit different. :( While it did appear to restore drive C, it apparently would not restore the MBR. I tried 4 times from 2 different images. 3 times under the recommended (Vista) environment and 1 under the legacy version (which BTW, took MUCH longer to run than the Vista version.) The error message I received each time was "Failed to restore MBR! Continue the volume restoration?" (To be clear, the restoration did continue (and finish) all 4 times.)

With this all said, it makes me wonder if the DVD imaging/burning routine really does support MBR restoration, even though the option is listed in the restore environment? I very briefly looked through the version 3 SP Desktop User Guide and didn't find anything.

grnxnm, any thoughts? (I have not went to Storage Craft support yet.)" }-

@HAN & Pete

Thanks guys for brining this issue to my attention. We're working on it. When the fix is available for this you'll need to download a new ISO for the recovery enviornment. This issue will only affect those users who experience it and who have custom MBR code (such as FD-ISR users). For the rest of you with the default MBR code already in place on the MBR you won't experience any issue (you may see the error to restore MBR, but your system will still boot after restore because the MBR code is already there). For those of you who experience this issue and have a blank code-section in your MBR prior to restore, you can use mbrfix.exe in the Windows installer recovery mode to patch a blank MBR code section. I anticipate we'll have a fix for this within a few days. Sorry about that. It's an unfortunate truth that no software is perfect. We try to mitigate that fact by responding quickly to such issues. Thanks again!

silver0066

August 24th, 2007, 06:19 PM

-{ Quote: "@HAN & Pete

Thanks guys for brining this issue to my attention. We're working on it. When the fix is available for this you'll need to download a new ISO for the recovery enviornment. This issue will only affect those users who experience it and who have custom MBR code (such as FD-ISR users). For the rest of you with the default MBR code already in place on the MBR you won't experience any issue (you may see the error to restore MBR, but your system will still boot after restore because the MBR code is already there). For those of you who experience this issue and have a blank code-section in your MBR prior to restore, you can use mbrfix.exe in the Windows installer recovery mode to patch a blank MBR code section. I anticipate we'll have a fix for this within a few days. Sorry about that. It's an unfortunate truth that no software is perfect. We try to mitigate that fact by responding quickly to such issues. Thanks again!" }-I am one of those that uses FD-ISR. Will you please let us know when the new update is availalbe? I just purchased 1 license 2 days ago and am considering more after some additional testing with HIR...which did not work yesterday on a test. I could have very well done some things in the wrong order, or it could be some king of a bug. I was restoring from a newer Dell laptop to an older one with different video and network cards. I will keep experimenting as time permits.

Silver

grnxnm

August 24th, 2007, 06:51 PM

Yup, I'll keep you posted.

aigle

August 24th, 2007, 08:34 PM

-{ Quote: "Hi Jim

Currently ShadowProtect doesn't have shrink on the fly so you are right you can't restore the bigger partition on a smaller drive. In testing HIR what I did was shrink the partition with Acronis Disk Director first and then image it. Then no problem. Note right now the issue HAN mentioned about restoring the mbr. Image is good, but there is that little nit, that should be fixed ASAP.

Pete" }-
Peter, does it mean that if I image my C partition/ drive( 10 Gb with 4 GB of data) and later on want to restore the image to a smaller C partition/ drive( say 6GB), SP will not let me do this?

Thanks

Peter2150

August 24th, 2007, 08:51 PM

-{ Quote: "Peter, does it mean that if I image my C partition/ drive( 10 Gb with 4 GB of data) and later on want to restore the image to a smaller C partition/ drive( say 6GB), SP will not let me do this?

Thanks" }-

Correct, if your current partition is 10g with 4gb of data it won't restore on 6gb at this time. IF you know you want to do this, then you can shrink the partition to 6gb and then image. Then you can restore. Shrink on the fly is coming.

Pete

Acadia

August 24th, 2007, 08:53 PM

This MBR issue thingie for FD-ISR users, is it a non-issue for those of us still using the old version of SP? Thanks.

Acadia

aigle

August 24th, 2007, 09:37 PM

-{ Quote: "Correct, if your current partition is 10g with 4gb of data it won't restore on 6gb at this time. IF you know you want to do this, then you can shrink the partition to 6gb and then image. Then you can restore. Shrink on the fly is coming.

Pete" }-
I wonder why SP has no such feature, I feel far less impressed now. ATI has this feature since long.

Peter2150

August 24th, 2007, 09:56 PM

-{ Quote: "This MBR issue thingie for FD-ISR users, is it a non-issue for those of us still using the old version of SP? Thanks.

Acadia" }-

If you are using an older version of SP, it's a non issue for now. Correct. In fact I did a restore tonight with the new version and it worked fine. If it hadn't, I'd have just gone to the other version and would have been fine.

Also note if you do a restore, and don't delete the volume first it won't be an issue as then the default is not restore the mbr. Kind of like an IFW restore.

Pete

Peter2150

August 24th, 2007, 09:57 PM

-{ Quote: "I wonder why SP has no such feature, I feel far less impressed now. ATI has this feature since long." }-

Aigle it's coming. All in all I think this version of SP blows ATI away. The continous incremental with the new image manager is awesome. The reason it's not there yet, is an issue of priority. Don't know for sure, but I'd suspect it's not as much of biggie for the IT types.

aigle

August 24th, 2007, 10:45 PM

-{ Quote: "The reason it's not there yet, is an issue of priority. Don't know for sure, but I'd suspect it's not as much of biggie for the IT types." }-Agree!

kennyboy

August 24th, 2007, 11:49 PM

Although there are bound to be a few bugs in any new release, it is incredibly reassuring to have grnxnm keeping so up to date and interested. Makes you think that when it is finished, this will be a very desirable piece of software.

Huupi

August 25th, 2007, 06:04 AM

I need no install,done everything from the recovery,SP 2 already serves me well,i can only think of a little speed difference,oke but that is just me,can imagine that many angry awaited the SP 3 release with more supported drivers,HIR etc.
At the moment the extra provisions are just overkill to me.So i stay with.......

huub.

nexstar

August 25th, 2007, 08:15 AM

Does the Server recovery iso work with the Desktop installation?

I've just requested the evaluation version but it is the desktop demo version I have installed and would be interested in.

They said that the iso would probably be ready on Wednesday for download so I presume this would be the updated one.

Graham

HAN

August 25th, 2007, 09:32 AM

-{ Quote: "Does the Server recovery iso work with the Desktop installation?

I've just requested the evaluation version but it is the desktop demo version I have installed and would be interested in.

They said that the iso would probably be ready on Wednesday for download so I presume this would be the updated one.

Graham" }-

My ISO download filename said it was the server version too but when I burnt it, it was, from everything I can see, the desktop version. IMO, you're good to go (except of course, the fact that the MBR restoration patch is coming in a few days.)

HAN

August 25th, 2007, 09:37 AM

nexstar

August 25th, 2007, 09:53 AM

-{ Quote: "IMO, you're good to go (except of course, the fact that the MBR restoration patch is coming in a few days.)" }-
Thanks for the info. As I want to try it out with Rollback, I'll wait for the patched version before downloading it.

Graham

grnxnm

August 25th, 2007, 01:35 PM

-{ Quote: "Does the Server recovery iso work with the Desktop installation?

I've just requested the evaluation version but it is the desktop demo version I have installed and would be interested in.

They said that the iso would probably be ready on Wednesday for download so I presume this would be the updated one.

Graham" }-

The ShadowProtect Desktop and Server Editions share the same ISO file for their recovery environment CD. In fact this same ISO also contains the installers for both the installed Desktop and Server edition products, as well as the ImageManager and KeyFileMaker (ImageManager and KeyFileMaker are for the Continuous Incrementals feature which is mostly for the IT community).

screamer

August 25th, 2007, 01:49 PM

I'm really interested in this software, but I'm a little confused. If I could get a better understanding of what I'm looking for, I'd be more than willing to go to my hip for the $80.00 / $160.00

The last time I trialed this software I had issues w/ FD-ISR. I've been assured that they were corrected. This was on my laptop. I didn't have the balz to try it on my work box (FD-ISR & nVidia RAID 0)

I only used the SP Recovery CD & Legacy Mode. My aim for this app is to replace ATI which I find super slow. 45min to image / 6hrs to recover.

Storagecraft just suggested that I D/L ShadowProtect Desktop Edition 3.0 until the ShadowProtect Recovery CD is available on Wednesday.

Do I need the Desktop edition or can I just use the Recovery CD to image and recover an image?

I realize that my question may be very elementary, but for some reason I just can't grasp this app ???

Second, even more elementary question. What procedure should I follow to image and restore? Yes, I RTFM but I still don't get it.

...screamer

Peter2150

August 25th, 2007, 02:07 PM

-{ Quote: "I'm really interested in this software, but I'm a little confused. If I could get a better understanding of what I'm looking for, I'd be more than willing to go to my hip for the $80.00 / $160.00

The last time I trialed this software I had issues w/ FD-ISR. I've been assured that they were corrected. This was on my laptop. I didn't have the balz to try it on my work box (FD-ISR & nVidia RAID 0)

I only used the SP Recovery CD & Legacy Mode. My aim for this app is to replace ATI which I find super slow. 45min to image / 6hrs to recover.

Storagecraft just suggested that I D/L ShadowProtect Desktop Edition 3.0 until the ShadowProtect Recovery CD is available on Wednesday.

Do I need the Desktop edition or can I just use the Recovery CD to image and recover an image?

I realize that my question may be very elementary, but for some reason I just can't grasp this app ???

Second, even more elementary question. What procedure should I follow to image and restore? Yes, I RTFM but I still don't get it.

...screamer" }-

Lots of options.

Okay. Assume you buy it. You download an ISO file and burn it to disk. That disk serves 2 purposes. 1) It is indeed the recovery disk. 2nd) It is the install disk for the Desktop version.

From here the options expand.

You can image from the desktop version, and you can verify the image from the desktop. Do it manually if you so desire You can also set schedules to automate taking incremental snapshots if you desire. Doing that will of course pile up incremental snapshots, hence Imagemanger. If you use continous incrementals it will follow a schedule every day taking say 15 minute incrementals. Then at the end of the day imagemanger will collapse the incrementals into one. At a designated time all other incrementals are deleted. Phew. It works beautifully. Hands off.

OR

You can fire up the Recovery CD and image/verify and restore from there. You can as in the desktop also mount the images.

When you boot the Recovery CD you will also see two options. Legacy which boots to Winpe, and recommend which boots to VistaPe. VistaPe is much faster, but there is a catch.

Nvidia Raid drivers. The drivers are now in the recovery CD, and the see Raid 0 configurations fine. Works fine on both of my machines which are different invidia chipsets. The catch is the set of drivers Microsoft chose to include with VistaPe. The chose a bad set, so although I can see my disks the results are at best sketchy. If it works the restore is fine, but it doesn't always work. So with Nvidia drivers best bet is use the Legacy boot, and all works fine.

Overkill????

Pete

Didn't answer one question. Simplest procedure of all is just image with the Desktop and restore with the recovery CD. Or even simpler if you want to do what I do which is restore every image. Just boot the CD and Image mount/verify(whichever) and restore.

Also no FDISR conflicts at all. I use VSS on FDISR and all is fine.

screamer

August 25th, 2007, 02:23 PM

Pete, I recall seeing several partitions on the laptop. One was the Dell recovery partition which has been deleted. There were several small FAT partitions also.
I needed to buy Acronis Disk Director in order to fix / combine all the small partitions in order to get my original 90G partition back.

When I go to restore an image, do I need to delete it first, or will SP show me a partition that is OK to restore to?

Will I see my original 160 / 320GB RAID 0 drive and just click Restore?

If I do see several small partitions can I combine them? Not sure if I'm making sense here, It's been a while since I trialed this app.

...screamer

silver0066

August 25th, 2007, 03:00 PM

-{ Quote: "@HAN & Pete

Thanks guys for brining this issue to my attention. We're working on it. When the fix is available for this you'll need to download a new ISO for the recovery enviornment. This issue will only affect those users who experience it and who have custom MBR code (such as FD-ISR users). For the rest of you with the default MBR code already in place on the MBR you won't experience any issue (you may see the error to restore MBR, but your system will still boot after restore because the MBR code is already there). For those of you who experience this issue and have a blank code-section in your MBR prior to restore, you can use mbrfix.exe in the Windows installer recovery mode to patch a blank MBR code section. I anticipate we'll have a fix for this within a few days. Sorry about that. It's an unfortunate truth that no software is perfect. We try to mitigate that fact by responding quickly to such issues. Thanks again!" }-grnxnm

I just purchased Desktop3 a couple of days ago. I did not get the Maintenance option as there was no explanation of it on the StorageCraft site.

Will I be able to get the new fix when it comes out?
What does the Maintenance option provide that is not available to me now?

I will be buying more licensing after more testing with HIR and will need to know what the Maintenance provides over no Maintenance.

Many thanks,

Silver

Peter2150

August 25th, 2007, 03:13 PM

-{ Quote: "grnxnm

I just purchased Desktop3 a couple of days ago. I did not get the Maintenance option as there was no explanation of it on the StorageCraft site.

Will I be able to get the new fix when it comes out?
What does the Maintenance option provide that is not available to me now?

I will be buying more licensing after more testing with HIR and will need to know what the Maintenance provides over no Maintenance.

Many thanks,

Silver" }-

Hi Silver

Can't speak for grnxnm, but I have to believe since it it a bug, there will be no issue.

As I understand the maintenance contract(I did get it), and what has actually happened, is I bought SP 2.0 and the maintenance contract. When 2.5 came out I received that. Now that 3.0 is out, I will also being receiving it. Another words anything release while the maintenance contract is in effect.

From the website it looks like when my maintenance contract expires, I can just purchase another year.

Pete

Peter2150

August 25th, 2007, 03:15 PM

-{ Quote: "Pete, I recall seeing several partitions on the laptop. One was the Dell recovery partition which has been deleted. There were several small FAT partitions also.
I needed to buy Acronis Disk Director in order to fix / combine all the small partitions in order to get my original 90G partition back.

When I go to restore an image, do I need to delete it first, or will SP show me a partition that is OK to restore to?

Will I see my original 160 / 320GB RAID 0 drive and just click Restore?

If I do see several small partitions can I combine them? Not sure if I'm making sense here, It's been a while since I trialed this app.

...screamer" }-

Hi Screamer.

I have a new IBM(Lenovo) Tablet PC. First thing I did was image it. I told it to image the whole drive. I was using IT edition, but the recoveryCD would be the same. What it did was create two images, one of each partition. When I did the restore, I just restore, the main partition, I left the hidden partition alone. No reason just lazy. Had a wanted too, it would have been a separate restore.

Pete

grnxnm

August 25th, 2007, 03:51 PM

@Silver

Of course you'll receive minor patches for free, such as the fix to the MBR-restore issue (where MBR restore fails when restoring from split optical media sets).

Maintenance gives you major upgrades for free.

Huupi

August 25th, 2007, 05:22 PM

-{ Quote: "This MBR issue thingie for FD-ISR users, is it a non-issue for those of us still using the old version of SP? Thanks.

Acadia" }-

Imaging for a year with SP2 and FDISR[bootback] ,never ever met any problem.

JimInVA

August 26th, 2007, 02:53 AM

-{ Quote: "Although there are bound to be a few bugs in any new release, it is incredibly reassuring to have grnxnm keeping so up to date and interested. Makes you think that when it is finished, this will be a very desirable piece of software." }-

Obviously, one would expect any piece of software to stand on its own merits before making a purchase. I spent many hours that bridged into days narrowing that which I would personally use and that which will become my recommendation to hundreds of clients. In the end, it came down to the products of two companies - Acronis and StorageCraft. Each have their own unique merits but only the StorageCraft products come with easy access to one like grnxnm.

It seems quite apparent that grnxnm takes pride for his portion of contribution to the product (at least for the ShadowProtect line) yet would be the first to suggest that it is a continual work in progress. Even with that, he would remain one of the most encouraging voices towards my right of choice towards any product... even that of a competitor's if it better fit my need.

And so... while a piece of software must certainly stand on its own merits, at any one point in time, it is the attitude of those behind the product that allow me a glimpse of what is yet to come. And so I've made my bet with StorageCraft... and have already had reason to communicate with various departments within the company. I have found them to be responsive and each of them seems to share something in common - an enthusiasm for the job that they do. It is an attitude that is both surprising and refreshing in today's marketplace.

Jim

Huupi

August 26th, 2007, 05:21 AM

According to Nate/Grnxnm the HIR option in the Desktop/Server version is limited to a machine where already SP [any version] is installed,so you can place any image from whatever OS windows on this desktop, As a consequence it means if you want to "HIR" more desktops you have to buy that many SP3 copies. I guess for home users this restriction is not a worry,you can play and have some fun. The IT version SP3 has no restrictions of this kind,but then you have to pay $$$

rodnh

August 26th, 2007, 07:59 AM

The HIR "limitation" with both the Desktop and Server editions of SP3 should be a concern for all home users who run dual boot XP/XP or XP/Vista machines. The limitation means that HIR will only work on one of the two boot partitions (volumes) - the one with SP3 installed on it. To have HIR work with both boot partitions, SP3 needs to be installed on both prior to imaging them. That appears to require two licenses, even though only one computer is involved. Either that or the $3500 annual fee for the IT edition, which is an amusing suggestion for home users. This significant restriction on HIR is not mentioned at all in the SPDT3 user guide or in the promotional material at the StorageCraft website. In fact, it is not even hinted that any type of HIR restriction exists for the Desktop edition. The way I found out about it was by accident in reading a post by Nate in the SP3 Server edition forum - hardly a place where home users hang out. I am now trying to get the licensing matter answered definitively over at the SPDT forum but I suspect that dual boot hard disks cannot be fully restored to new hardware with a single license using HIR. I purchased SPDT3 over other imaging software (most notably True Image, which I now use) for several reasons in addition to the promise of HIR. I am still pleased with it despite this limitation. The official WinPE recovery environment is well worth it even if that was the only benefit. I am a little disappointed however because I run a dual boot XP/XP system. I should be able to get one of my XP partitions migrated when the time comes. The other one will not be as easy as I had hoped, requiring a repair install and subsequent updates. Purchasing two licenses for one computer to accomplish this with HIR is not an option I care to exercise. Ignorance is bliss until you find out the real deal.

Rod

Peter2150

August 26th, 2007, 08:37 AM

-{ Quote: "The HIR "limitation" with both the Desktop and Server editions of SP3 should be a concern for all home users who run dual boot XP/XP or XP/Vista machines. The limitation means that HIR will only work on one of the two boot partitions (volumes) - the one with SP3 installed on it. To have HIR work with both boot partitions, SP3 needs to be installed on both prior to imaging them. That appears to require two licenses, even though only one computer is involved. Either that or the $3500 annual fee for the IT edition, which is an amusing suggestion for home users. This significant restriction on HIR is not mentioned at all in the SPDT3 user guide or in the promotional material at the StorageCraft website. In fact, it is not even hinted that any type of HIR restriction exists for the Desktop edition. The way I found out about it was by accident in reading a post by Nate in the SP3 Server edition forum - hardly a place where home users hang out. I am now trying to get the licensing matter answered definitively over at the SPDT forum but I suspect that dual boot hard disks cannot be fully restored to new hardware with a single license using HIR. I purchased SPDT3 over other imaging software (most notably True Image, which I now use) for several reasons in addition to the promise of HIR. I am still pleased with it despite this limitation. The official WinPE recovery environment is well worth it even if that was the only benefit. I am a little disappointed however because I run a dual boot XP/XP system. I should be able to get one of my XP partitions migrated when the time comes. The other one will not be as easy as I had hoped, requiring a repair install and subsequent updates. Purchasing two licenses for one computer to accomplish this with HIR is not an option I care to exercise. Ignorance is bliss until you find out the real deal.

Rod" }-

Hi Rod

One suggestion is do one partition at a time. Not sure this is all that bad a restriction. I think for most "home" users HIR is best left alone. People will assume they can just restore an image and like magic there system will run fine. Whole purpose of HIR is to be able to restore the image and have the system boot. That doesn't mean it runs perfectly. There is still a lot of driver installation work to be done.

HIR works beautifully, and I have tested it thoroughly here, but still if I bought a new machine, I'd do software install from scratch. I can see the beauty of it for an IT situation where they may have lots of almost identical machines.

Pete

silver0066

August 26th, 2007, 01:09 PM

-{ Quote: "Hi Rod

One suggestion is do one partition at a time. Not sure this is all that bad a restriction. I think for most "home" users HIR is best left alone. People will assume they can just restore an image and like magic there system will run fine. Whole purpose of HIR is to be able to restore the image and have the system boot. That doesn't mean it runs perfectly. There is still a lot of driver installation work to be done.

HIR works beautifully, and I have tested it thoroughly here, but still if I bought a new machine, I'd do software install from scratch. I can see the beauty of it for an IT situation where they may have lots of almost identical machines.

Pete" }-Pete,

The HIR feature is very beneficial for some home users. In my case, for example, I have a desktop as my main machine, and a laptop for traveling, which I do infrequently. It is much easier to restore the laptop from the desktop using HIR or Acronis UR than to reinstall/deinstall all of the program changes since I last used it.

The driver installations can be handled automatically by using either Driver Magician or Driver Genius with their one click auto extract features. I have learned to uninstall some of the unique network and video card driver setup programs from the main machine before backing up for the HIR install. Then I just restore the main machine from a FDISR archive to get the drivers back.

Silver

grnxnm

August 26th, 2007, 01:17 PM

-{ Quote: "The HIR "limitation" with both the Desktop and Server editions of SP3 should be a concern for all home users who run dual boot XP/XP or XP/Vista machines. The limitation means that HIR will only work on one of the two boot partitions (volumes) - the one with SP3 installed on it. To have HIR work with both boot partitions, SP3 needs to be installed on both prior to imaging them. That appears to require two licenses, even though only one computer is involved. Either that or the $3500 annual fee for the IT edition, which is an amusing suggestion for home users. This significant restriction on HIR is not mentioned at all in the SPDT3 user guide or in the promotional material at the StorageCraft website. In fact, it is not even hinted that any type of HIR restriction exists for the Desktop edition. The way I found out about it was by accident in reading a post by Nate in the SP3 Server edition forum - hardly a place where home users hang out. I am now trying to get the licensing matter answered definitively over at the SPDT forum but I suspect that dual boot hard disks cannot be fully restored to new hardware with a single license using HIR. I purchased SPDT3 over other imaging software (most notably True Image, which I now use) for several reasons in addition to the promise of HIR. I am still pleased with it despite this limitation. The official WinPE recovery environment is well worth it even if that was the only benefit. I am a little disappointed however because I run a dual boot XP/XP system. I should be able to get one of my XP partitions migrated when the time comes. The other one will not be as easy as I had hoped, requiring a repair install and subsequent updates. Purchasing two licenses for one computer to accomplish this with HIR is not an option I care to exercise. Ignorance is bliss until you find out the real deal.

Rod" }-

On that note, if you're running a dual-boot system and you have ShadowProtect installed on one OS, and a job with incremental tracking, and you boot the other OS (assuming SP is not on this other OS) and make changes to the first OS's volume, the fast incremental tracking performed by SP in the first OS won't be aware that changes were made (because you made them from an alternate environment) and so your next incremental backup (when you boot back to the first OS) will be bad. You can work around this issue by deleteing all *.idx files in the root of your volumes whenever you boot to an environment on which SP is not installed. This will reset the incremental tracking serialized data. The drawback is that your next image will be a slow diff-based incremental rather than a fast incremental. This whole topic was discussed in another thread but I forget which one, sorry.

grnxnm

August 26th, 2007, 03:01 PM

-{ Quote: "The HIR "limitation" with both the Desktop and Server editions of SP3 should be a concern for all home users who run dual boot XP/XP or XP/Vista machines. The limitation means that HIR will only work on one of the two boot partitions (volumes) - the one with SP3 installed on it. To have HIR work with both boot partitions, SP3 needs to be installed on both prior to imaging them. That appears to require two licenses, even though only one computer is involved. Either that or the $3500 annual fee for the IT edition, which is an amusing suggestion for home users. This significant restriction on HIR is not mentioned at all in the SPDT3 user guide or in the promotional material at the StorageCraft website. In fact, it is not even hinted that any type of HIR restriction exists for the Desktop edition. The way I found out about it was by accident in reading a post by Nate in the SP3 Server edition forum - hardly a place where home users hang out. I am now trying to get the licensing matter answered definitively over at the SPDT forum but I suspect that dual boot hard disks cannot be fully restored to new hardware with a single license using HIR. I purchased SPDT3 over other imaging software (most notably True Image, which I now use) for several reasons in addition to the promise of HIR. I am still pleased with it despite this limitation. The official WinPE recovery environment is well worth it even if that was the only benefit. I am a little disappointed however because I run a dual boot XP/XP system. I should be able to get one of my XP partitions migrated when the time comes. The other one will not be as easy as I had hoped, requiring a repair install and subsequent updates. Purchasing two licenses for one computer to accomplish this with HIR is not an option I care to exercise. Ignorance is bliss until you find out the real deal.

Rod" }-

Workaround for you -> Install ShadowProtect in both of your boot partitions, even if you only activate it in one of them. Desktop/Server edition HIR will operate on an OS volume containing even an expired trial version of ShadowProtect. The added benefit is that if you dual boot windows 2000+ OSs, and you install ShadowProtect in both, then no matter which OS you choose to boot, the incremental tracking will continue to take place and you won't have to worry about the bad incrementals issue which I mentioned in the previous post.

rodnh

August 26th, 2007, 07:08 PM

Thank you very much grnxnm. I had a thought that might work but wasn't sure, currently have no convenient way to test it and didn't want to ask specifically. Anyway, I'm not complaining even if it wouldn't work. I knew about the possibility of such a restriction prior to purchase - from Nate's post, although I found it only by chance. I went ahead and purchased anyway since I had other good reasons to move to SP than the HIR capability. I didn't even need to trial the software to make that decision. The WinPE recovery environment, together with the ability to directly (and easily, w/o third party technical "fixes") add your own drivers if needed was a compelling enough reason for me. And it works slick, just as I expected it to.

Regarding the *.idx files. I noticed they have shown up in the roots of the two partitions I have imaged with SPDT3 so far. I did not invoke any kind of incremental scheduling - at least not knowingly. Both images were done manually from within windows. One was also done at a prior time from the recovery disk. Would it be OK to systematically delete these files if I don't use the incremental/differential imaging features? Provided they are not needed for any other purpose, such as scheduling full partition images, I'd prefer to just delete them until such time as I might want to start using incrementals.

I must say your posts here on product information/support present a great "public face" to StorageCraft. That's rare nowadays and it can be a compelling reason by itself to purchase a product. It certainly did not go unnoticed by me before I made my SP purchase decision. Even an excellent reputation can be damaged by a poor public face so I hope the SC powers that be are properly cognizant of your contribution to the company outside of your coding efforts and are compensating you in some extra fashion for it.

Rod

Peter2150

August 26th, 2007, 07:36 PM

Rod

I've been using, testing, and beating on the ShadowProtect products. You won't be disappointed.

Pete

Karen76

August 27th, 2007, 02:38 AM

-{ Quote: "Rod

I've been using, testing, and beating on the ShadowProtect products. You won't be disappointed.

Pete" }-

Well, I am. I must be a masochist. Despite my previous adverse experience with ShadowProtect v3, I decided to give it a second chance. I uninstalled Seagate DiscWizard (ATI v10), rebooted, installed the trial version of SP v3, rebooted then tried to make a backup image of my primary hard drive.

After running for around 10 minutes, SP's screen said it was still initializing my drive. I noticed that both my MSN and Firefox browsers were frozen. I tried to activate Task Manager to check CPU usage but no dice. I moved my cursor to cancel the operation, but the cursor froze in place as soon as it touched the SP screen. I had to turn off my PC's power to escape then rebooted into a different FD-ISR snapshot. I have no idea what the problem/conflict is this time and probably never will. For a highly-touted program I've waited for months to finally be able to test on Vista, I'm disappointed I can't even evaluate it. :'(

Peter2150

August 27th, 2007, 08:16 AM

-{ Quote: "Well, I am. I must be a masochist. Despite my previous adverse experience with ShadowProtect v3, I decided to give it a second chance. I uninstalled Seagate DiscWizard (ATI v10), rebooted, installed the trial version of SP v3, rebooted then tried to make a backup image of my primary hard drive.

After running for around 10 minutes, SP's screen said it was still initializing my drive. I noticed that both my MSN and Firefox browsers were frozen. I tried to activate Task Manager to check CPU usage but no dice. I moved my cursor to cancel the operation, but the cursor froze in place as soon as it touched the SP screen. I had to turn off my PC's power to escape then rebooted into a different FD-ISR snapshot. I have no idea what the problem/conflict is this time and probably never will. For a highly-touted program I've waited for months to finally be able to test on Vista, I'm disappointed I can't even evaluate it. :'(" }-

I've not tried installing it on Vista. I assume you are using 32 bit vista. I may give it a try later today. I suspect a lot of your problems are Vista, I know I can't run half my software on it.

rodnh

August 27th, 2007, 12:18 PM

-{ Quote: "Rod

I've been using, testing, and beating on the ShadowProtect products. You won't be disappointed.

Pete" }-

Thanks Pete. Have you noticed any changes to your system clock when you boot from the recovery CD? My system clock gets bumped up one hour when I boot the recommended environment and I have to change it back when when booting to XP normally. That doesn't happen when booting the legacy environment - only the recommended one. I don't change or do anything that might cause it. Just booting seems to do it. Since it's exactly one hour it might have something to do with how the recommended environment treats daylight savings time as compared with the legacy environment. I'm on Eastern Daylight Time (UT -4hrs).

Rod

Karen76

August 27th, 2007, 12:23 PM

-{ Quote: "I've not tried installing it on Vista. I assume you are using 32 bit vista. I may give it a try later today. I suspect a lot of your problems are Vista, I know I can't run half my software on it." }-

I am using 32-bit Vista. What I find bizarre is I've had no problems getting old, this-can't-possibly-work-on-Vista software to run trouble-free on my new PC (at least after excluding them from DEP) whereas there are numerous problems with some "Vista compatible" programs. Usually these are just minor glitches. ShadowProtect v3 has the dubious distinction of being the only program I can't get to function at all.

Seagate DiscWizard (ATI v10) works fine. Even with DiscWizard installed, Paragon Drive Backup 8.5 Professional makes and restores images without a hitch so long as I use the backup wizard. Using the Cyclic backup wizard to make scheduled images locks up my system. Paragon support believed (i.e. guessed/assumed) my anti-virus or some other security program was preventing a certain script from running. Even with no other imaging software installed, ShadowProtect won't function on my new PC. This isn't my idea of what constitutes "Vista compatible" software. ::)

huntnyc

August 27th, 2007, 12:32 PM

-{ Quote: "Thanks Pete. Have you noticed any changes to your system clock when you boot from the recovery CD? My system clock gets bumped up one hour when I boot the recommended environment and I have to change it back when when booting to XP normally. That doesn't happen when booting the legacy environment - only the recommended one. I don't change or do anything that might cause it. Just booting seems to do it. Since it's exactly one hour it might have something to do with how the recommended environment treats daylight savings time as compared with the legacy environment. I'm on Eastern Daylight Time (UT -4hrs).

Rod" }-

Not Pete, but I confirm it on my system as well, just as you said. Have reported it to Storagecraft but will call again. It may be a Microsoft thing but we will see.

Gary

Huupi

August 27th, 2007, 12:48 PM

I got SP2 never managed to work on the main rig,data vol. backed up oke but the windows vol. failed all the time,had some talk back and forth with support but no clue.Like Albert i do backup/recovery from the CD,and now after a year of imaging never had any failure.So SP2 serves my needs very well,thats the reason i stay with SP2.

sukarof

August 27th, 2007, 01:18 PM

I run SP under Vista and it works almost fine. The only thing, if I am not doing something wrong, is that the compression doesnt seem to work. If I do a image in XP (version 2.5) my 36GB C partition ends up with a 17GB image file, while in doing the same thing in Vista (standard compression, SP version 3) the image file is 30GB. But otherwise it works very well.
I have posted on the Storagecraft forum about it.

grnxnm

August 27th, 2007, 02:32 PM

Yeah, the clock issue is a known bug in Vista-WinPE. We're working on a fix, but it may require involvement from MS (translation: it may take time). For now just flip your clock back after using the "Recommended" environment. It annoys me too. ;)

Peter2150

August 27th, 2007, 02:59 PM

-{ Quote: "I am using 32-bit Vista. What I find bizarre is I've had no problems getting old, this-can't-possibly-work-on-Vista software to run trouble-free on my new PC (at least after excluding them from DEP) whereas there are numerous problems with some "Vista compatible" programs. Usually these are just minor glitches. ShadowProtect v3 has the dubious distinction of being the only program I can't get to function at all.

Seagate DiscWizard (ATI v10) works fine. Even with DiscWizard installed, Paragon Drive Backup 8.5 Professional makes and restores images without a hitch so long as I use the backup wizard. Using the Cyclic backup wizard to make scheduled images locks up my system. Paragon support believed (i.e. guessed/assumed) my anti-virus or some other security program was preventing a certain script from running. Even with no other imaging software installed, ShadowProtect won't function on my new PC. This isn't my idea of what constitutes "Vista compatible" software. ::)" }-

Hi Karen

Just updated my Vista image, and reinstalled FDISR. Updated an archive and recreated a second snapshot. No errors. Will let you know about SP3.

Pete

grnxnm

August 27th, 2007, 05:10 PM

-{ Quote: "I am using 32-bit Vista. What I find bizarre is I've had no problems getting old, this-can't-possibly-work-on-Vista software to run trouble-free on my new PC (at least after excluding them from DEP) whereas there are numerous problems with some "Vista compatible" programs. Usually these are just minor glitches. ShadowProtect v3 has the dubious distinction of being the only program I can't get to function at all.

Seagate DiscWizard (ATI v10) works fine. Even with DiscWizard installed, Paragon Drive Backup 8.5 Professional makes and restores images without a hitch so long as I use the backup wizard. Using the Cyclic backup wizard to make scheduled images locks up my system. Paragon support believed (i.e. guessed/assumed) my anti-virus or some other security program was preventing a certain script from running. Even with no other imaging software installed, ShadowProtect won't function on my new PC. This isn't my idea of what constitutes "Vista compatible" software. ::)" }-

Hi Karen,

I suspect this has nothing to do with Vista compatibility, but is more likely related to an interoperability issue particular to your machine's configuration. I suggest that you open a support incident at storagecraft.com and we'll work with you on this issue.

Karen76

August 27th, 2007, 06:50 PM

-{ Quote: "Hi Karen,

I suspect this has nothing to do with Vista compatibility, but is more likely related to an interoperability issue particular to your machine's configuration. I suggest that you open a support incident at storagecraft.com and we'll work with you on this issue." }-

Hello grnxnm,

I've received a couple cursory replies from Storagecraft support. Their first e-mail said there should be no "other backup or imaging products" on any system using ShadowProtect. Strictly applied, that would include FD-ISR. While I would never, under any set of circumstances, stop using FD-ISR, I did uninstall Seagate DiscWizard after ShadowProtect gave me a BSOD and a horrendous noise from my PC.

My last e-mail from Storagecraft said there was probably some software incompatibility which precluded the use of ShadowProtect on my PC. There was no offer to assist me in resolving the problem. While I appreciate your offer and your presence here on Wilders, I have a strong impression Storagecraft is geared toward corporate customers, not individual PC owners. I understand this may be a smart business decision if only because it avoids the expense and hassle of handling support requests from numerous individual (low $) users.

I don't believe I have an exotic PC configuration. I'm not using RAID and my key active programs are KIS v7, FD-ISR, BOClean v4.25, Spy Sweeper and WinPatrol. I'm really not interested in an imaging program which isn't compatible with my current software.

I can't seriously test ShadowProtect without buying the program. The trial version is limited and, since I'm on dial-up, I'd be drawing Social Security checks before I finished the full evaluation's 318 MB download. Considering ShadowProtect would cost $100+ (program, maintenance fee, installation CD), I think I'd be better served with a combination of Seagate DiscWizard (which is free) and Paragon Drive Backup 8.5 Professional (which is available for $30 with a 70% off coupon). Between FD-ISR and these two mutually-compatible imaging programs, I think there would be sufficient layers of backup redundancy to even protect my glitch-prone Vista PC. :)

Thank you again for your offer.

Peter2150

August 27th, 2007, 08:18 PM

Karen

I finally finished testing here. Both FDISR and ShadowProtect 3.0 worked fine under Vista here, and along side of each other. So there is some conflict on your system.

I understand your not wanting to bother, but the one reason for trying to find it is it will pop again to plague you.

Pete

Horus37

August 27th, 2007, 09:19 PM

Can someone else try boclean 4.25 with shadowprotect and see if there is a conflict? Seeing someone like karen having problems with compatibility between the two has me curious if it's boclean.

Peter2150

August 27th, 2007, 09:43 PM

-{ Quote: "Can someone else try boclean 4.25 with shadowprotect and see if there is a conflict? Seeing someone like karen having problems with compatibility between the two has me curious if it's boclean." }-

Horus. I am not going to be able to do that under Vista at this point, as I need to get my working XP snapshot back on. If she doesn't want to bother, I am afraid, I have to drop it at this pont.

Pete

Karen76

August 27th, 2007, 10:26 PM

-{ Quote: "Horus. I am not going to be able to do that under Vista at this point, as I need to get my working XP snapshot back on. If she doesn't want to bother, I am afraid, I have to drop it at this pont.

Pete" }-

"Doesn't want to bother"? ??? As I already mentioned, for me to be able to fully test ShadowProtect then I'd have to purchase the program. The trial version is limited in function and there's no way I can download the 318 MB evaluation version via dial-up. If I could afford to casually spend $100+ on a program which may not be compatible with my PC/software then I wouldn't be using dial-up Internet in the first place.

I tested the trial version of ShadowProtect twice with negative results. I'm sure very few folks would have tried it a second time if they'd heard the blood-curding noise emitted by my PC when SP crashed my system the first time. I'm already working with seven software development teams to assist them in resolving various Vista compatibility issues. If officials at Storagecraft (who are clearly more oriented towards catering to corporations than individual consumers) want to send me a free SP installation CD then I'll be delighted to "bother" to evaluate the program further.

Peter2150

August 27th, 2007, 11:15 PM

-{ Quote: ""Doesn't want to bother"? ??? As I already mentioned, for me to be able to fully test ShadowProtect then I'd have to purchase the program. The trial version is limited in function and there's no way I can download the 318 MB evaluation version via dial-up. If I could afford to casually spend $100+ on a program which may not be compatible with my PC/software then I wouldn't be using dial-up Internet in the first place.

I tested the trial version of ShadowProtect twice with negative results. I'm sure very few folks would have tried it a second time if they'd heard the blood-curding noise emitted by my PC when SP crashed my system the first time. I'm already working with seven software development teams to assist them in resolving various Vista compatibility issues. If officials at Storagecraft (who are clearly more oriented towards catering to corporations than individual consumers) want to send me a free SP installation CD then I'll be delighted to "bother" to evaluate the program further." }-

Karen

No doubt you can run from the recovery CD. But installing from the CD to the desktop won't be any different than installing from the trial. I guess thats why I refered to your not wanting to bother. My apologies on that. I almost suggested facetiously you consider going to XP pro, but if you are having that many issues with Vista, you might seriously want to consider it.

Pete

silver0066

August 28th, 2007, 09:41 AM

-{ Quote: "Yeah, the clock issue is a known bug in Vista-WinPE. We're working on a fix, but it may require involvement from MS (translation: it may take time). For now just flip your clock back after using the "Recommended" environment. It annoys me too. ;)" }-The bug is also in Win XP SP2. If you will look at the detailed logs, it appears that it has something to do with Daylight Savings Time.

Peter2150

August 28th, 2007, 10:52 AM

-{ Quote: "The bug is also in Win XP SP2. If you will look at the detailed logs, it appears that it has something to do with Daylight Savings Time." }-

Forutnately it doesn't show up in WinPe which is the legacy environment. I'd be glad to deal with the time issue but alas, the nvidia issue of VistaPe.

ErikAlbert

August 28th, 2007, 11:10 AM

-{ Quote: "The bug is also in Win XP SP2. If you will look at the detailed logs, it appears that it has something to do with Daylight Savings Time." }-
I only use the Recovery CD and only for my system partition.
I use the date and time in the file-name, like this "SYSTEM YYYYMMDD HHMM", since there is no automatic numbering and I don't care about the system date/time anymore. My image-files are now sorted properly also. Last file = last backup.

grnxnm

August 28th, 2007, 01:32 PM

-{ Quote: "The bug is also in Win XP SP2. If you will look at the detailed logs, it appears that it has something to do with Daylight Savings Time." }-

Wow, I didn't know that (that this is also an issue in XP SP2). Can you point me to a Microsoft KB article on this?

Durad

August 28th, 2007, 01:38 PM

How is that "Restore Anywhere" feature working?

Can it be used on registered PC only or? (what are licence terms about this??)

grnxnm

August 28th, 2007, 03:41 PM

-{ Quote: "How is that "Restore Anywhere" feature working?

Can it be used on registered PC only or? (what are licence terms about this??)" }-

The machine you restore to can be any machine, physical or virtual, which supports Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista. However, regarding the HIR (Hardware Independent Restore) capability in the Desktop/Server 3.x editions of ShadowProtect, the image that you're restoring must come from a machine's OS volume on which ShadowProtect was installed.

The ShadowProtect IT Edition 3.x HIR capability does not require that ShadowProtect was installed on the source machine.

starfish_001

August 29th, 2007, 04:44 AM

-{ Quote: "The machine you restore to can be any machine, physical or virtual, which supports Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista. However, regarding the HIR (Hardware Independent Restore) capability in the Desktop/Server 3.x editions of ShadowProtect, the image that you're restoring must come from a machine's OS volume on which ShadowProtect was installed.

The ShadowProtect IT Edition 3.x HIR capability does not require that ShadowProtect was installed on the source machine." }-

Does this apply to images created from the recovery disk of the desktop consumer version?

I'd like to make images that have HIR for 3 machines once in a while - I use FD archives and Acronis Workstation-unirestore most of the time.

But the HIR ascpect is appealing

silver0066

August 29th, 2007, 09:42 AM

-{ Quote: "Forutnately it doesn't show up in WinPe which is the legacy environment. I'd be glad to deal with the time issue but alas, the nvidia issue of VistaPe." }-I live on the Pacific Coast, GMT-8. When one of screens flew by during a backup or restore, I can't remember, I noticed a screen that said Pacific Time GMT-7. I think it is a minor programming error that could be easily fixed.

Peter2150

August 29th, 2007, 10:11 AM

-{ Quote: "I live on the Pacific Coast, GMT-8. When one of screens flew by during a backup or restore, I can't remember, I noticed a screen that said Pacific Time GMT-7. I think it is a minor programming error that could be easily fixed." }-

Check your clock time. I bet it's off.

Unfortunately even if it's a minor error, it's in the Vistape stuff not shadowprotect which means Microsoft has to do the fix.

silver0066

August 29th, 2007, 11:32 AM

-{ Quote: "Check your clock time. I bet it's off.

Unfortunately even if it's a minor error, it's in the Vistape stuff not shadowprotect which means Microsoft has to do the fix." }-My clock time is not off. What happens is that if I do a Recovery restore from the boot disk, the clock is set forward by one hour.

Peter2150

August 29th, 2007, 11:55 AM

-{ Quote: "My clock time is not off. What happens is that if I do a Recovery restore from the boot disk, the clock is set forward by one hour." }-

Yep, I experienced between 1 and 2 hours. Nothng I did while in the Recovery Environment mattered. Grnxnm said that behaviour was what they were experiencing and the problem is in VistaPe.

Pete

HAN

August 29th, 2007, 01:41 PM

I verified a few days ago that each time I boot from the Recovery CD into the recommended (Vista PE) environment, my PC's clock advances by one hour. It doesn't happen when I boot into the legacy environment. It's not a big deal but one I hope MS addresses soon... :)

grnxnm

August 29th, 2007, 02:02 PM

-{ Quote: "Does this apply to images created from the recovery disk of the desktop consumer version?

I'd like to make images that have HIR for 3 machines once in a while - I use FD archives and Acronis Workstation-unirestore most of the time.

But the HIR ascpect is appealing" }-

For ShadowProtect Desktop/Sever 3.0, HIR functionality will work for any image of an OS volume on which any flavor (trial/full/etc) of ShadowProtect was installed, regardless whether that image was taken from within live windows or from the recovery environment, including any existing older images taken with previous versions of ShadowProtect.

rodnh

August 29th, 2007, 02:17 PM

This morning I successfully moved an XP partition from a quad-boot DOS6/98SE/XPSP2/XPSP2 hard disk to a different single-boot physical disk that was initially all unallocated space using SPDT3. The source XP was in the third physical position on the source disk. The destination position was the first physical position on the destination disk. I am very pleased (and somewhat surprised) with the result.

My first attempt failed because I thought XP recorded partition location information in the XP registry and moving to a different physical location would require that information to be changed in order for a successful boot. I therefore also used SavePart, a DOS program to patch the restored XP registry with the updated partition location information - or so I thought. It seemed to make some partition boundary adjustments but the resulting partition wouldn't boot, hanging just before the login screen.

Sooo, I again restored the source partition using only SPDT3. To my surprise, it booted right up after restore and everything seems perfect. The boot.ini file was automatically patched by SPDT3 and although it works as is as the default, it also refers to a second, selectable XP boot partition which does not exist on the single-boot destination disk. That is easily corrected with a manual edit. I did not restore the source mbr or the source first head since those would not be appropriate in going from an 11 partition disk with a third party boot manager to a 2 partition disk with no boot manager. The source and destination disk were the same total size (80gb).

Apparently SPDT3 automatically revises any partition location information in the XP registry during a restore to a different partition location. Either that or the information I had about such things in the registry is not valid. Can anyone confirm this action by SPDT3?

I am liking SPDT3 very much. I am eager to try the new HIR function but alas, I have no new hardware to try it out on at the present time. :'(

Note that my system clock also gets sets ahead one hour but ONLY when using the "recommened" boot environment. There is no clock setting change when using the "legacy" boot environment. I don't need the "recommended" environment at this time so a prompt fix is not an important issue for me.

Rod

grnxnm

August 29th, 2007, 04:11 PM

-{ Quote: "Thank you very much grnxnm. I had a thought that might work but wasn't sure, currently have no convenient way to test it and didn't want to ask specifically. Anyway, I'm not complaining even if it wouldn't work. I knew about the possibility of such a restriction prior to purchase - from Nate's post, although I found it only by chance. I went ahead and purchased anyway since I had other good reasons to move to SP than the HIR capability. I didn't even need to trial the software to make that decision. The WinPE recovery environment, together with the ability to directly (and easily, w/o third party technical "fixes") add your own drivers if needed was a compelling enough reason for me. And it works slick, just as I expected it to.

Regarding the *.idx files. I noticed they have shown up in the roots of the two partitions I have imaged with SPDT3 so far. I did not invoke any kind of incremental scheduling - at least not knowingly. Both images were done manually from within windows. One was also done at a prior time from the recovery disk. Would it be OK to systematically delete these files if I don't use the incremental/differential imaging features? Provided they are not needed for any other purpose, such as scheduling full partition images, I'd prefer to just delete them until such time as I might want to start using incrementals.

I must say your posts here on product information/support present a great "public face" to StorageCraft. That's rare nowadays and it can be a compelling reason by itself to purchase a product. It certainly did not go unnoticed by me before I made my SP purchase decision. Even an excellent reputation can be damaged by a poor public face so I hope the SC powers that be are properly cognizant of your contribution to the company outside of your coding efforts and are compensating you in some extra fashion for it.

Rod" }-

If you never plan on using ShadowProtect for incremental imaging then it does no harm to delete the .idx files in the root directories of your volumes. If you do start using incremental imaging then leave those .idx files alone. Frankly there's never much harm in deleting those .idx files, but they'll just come back. They're written at shutdown time, so each time you shut down they'll reappear on your next boot.

Defenestration

August 29th, 2007, 04:44 PM

I've just installed SPD 3.0 on my machine and have tried to create a Conitnuous Incremental schedule every 15 minutes, but when I set it running SPD "hangs" (ie. the window becomes unresponsive and nothing happens). Eventually, I terminated ShadowProtectSvc.exe but when I started it again it just said "Connecting" for a while, before the GUI became responsive again. Once in, the status of the job was "failed" and the log was as follows (machine info and Volume info removed in case of privacy issues):

29-Aug-2007 21:17:27 service 100 service (build 40) started job by incremental trigger
29-Aug-2007 21:17:27 service 300 trial period has 23 days left
29-Aug-2007 21:17:27 service 104 machine information: <removed> DEFAULT
29-Aug-2007 21:17:27 service 504 Volume {<removed>} was not found
29-Aug-2007 21:17:27 service 100 no need to get snapshot
29-Aug-2007 21:17:27 service 101 Cannot execute job (Unspecified error 0x80004005(2147500037))

Also, the Continuous Incrementals options has me a bit confused - What is the difference between the top "VSS Incremental Backups" and the bottom "Additional Incremental Backups" ?

Can someone explain how to set it up so I can keep on having continuous backups every 15 minutes, every day of the week, every day of the year ?

PS. The on-line help could do with a few tutorials using backup scenarios.

Defenestration

August 29th, 2007, 04:49 PM

BTW, does verify in 3.0 do a byte-by-byte comparison, or does it just do a simple CRC as in 2.5 ?

Peter2150

August 29th, 2007, 05:39 PM

-{ Quote: "BTW, does verify in 3.0 do a byte-by-byte comparison, or does it just do a simple CRC as in 2.5 ?" }-

Not sure, have to wait on grnxnm. All I know is I've never had one verfiy and fail to restore.

Peter2150

August 29th, 2007, 05:46 PM

Defenestration

August 29th, 2007, 06:10 PM

After readin the help I came across the bit about configuring the imagemanager. However, there is no shortcut for it on the Start Menu so I cannot et it up. Is this only for registered users ?

grnxnm

August 29th, 2007, 06:21 PM

-{ Quote: "I've just installed SPD 3.0 on my machine and have tried to create a Conitnuous Incremental schedule every 15 minutes, but when I set it running SPD "hangs" (ie. the window becomes unresponsive and nothing happens). Eventually, I terminated ShadowProtectSvc.exe but when I started it again it just said "Connecting" for a while, before the GUI became responsive again. Once in, the status of the job was "failed" and the log was as follows (machine info and Volume info removed in case of privacy issues):

29-Aug-2007 21:17:27 service 100 service (build 40) started job by incremental trigger
29-Aug-2007 21:17:27 service 300 trial period has 23 days left
29-Aug-2007 21:17:27 service 104 machine information: <removed> DEFAULT
29-Aug-2007 21:17:27 service 504 Volume {<removed>} was not found
29-Aug-2007 21:17:27 service 100 no need to get snapshot
29-Aug-2007 21:17:27 service 101 Cannot execute job (Unspecified error 0x80004005(2147500037))

Also, the Continuous Incrementals options has me a bit confused - What is the difference between the top "VSS Incremental Backups" and the bottom "Additional Incremental Backups" ?

Can someone explain how to set it up so I can keep on having continuous backups every 15 minutes, every day of the week, every day of the year ?

PS. The on-line help could do with a few tutorials using backup scenarios." }-

Wow, that's crazy stuff. Volume {<removed>}? machine information: <removed>? I've never seen anything like that. I suspect there's some amazing software on your machine, and it's not happy that you installed ShadowProtect. Hmm. It's also very strange that it apparently (according to your description) took a long time to connect the GUI to the service's DCOM interface. Normally, a local connect to the service is pretty much instantaneous. I'm not sure what to make of this. Do you have some kind of third party firewall installed that caused this? Or did an "Unblock port" dialog pop up an didn't respond to it for a while?

On to ImageManager question - the installer for ImageManager is available on the recovery environment CD. You have to request a full eval to get access to the ISO for this CD if you want to try this out. I'll see about have it posted so you can just download the sucker. Um, also, relating to the VSS vs non-VSS options within Continuous Incremental jobs - the thing is that when you take a VSS incremental backup, it's always at least a few hundred KB in size, whereas if you're not so concerned about VSS we give you the option (you can turn this on or off) to have many of your intra-daily incrementals taken without VSS, which results in smaller incremental image sizes as well as faster imaging (as there's no VSS quiescence going on at the time they're taken). Such non-VSS incrementals still capture the filesystem in a nice flushed state.

The verify uses CRC32 hashing to test every byte in your image file to ensure that nothing has changed. Additionally, if you have used any compression (most users do as compression saves both time and space) and/or encryption, then the decompression and decryption routines will detect any corruption as the entire image file data content is tested. So there are up to three tests that are performed on the data during a verify.

Defenestration

August 29th, 2007, 07:40 PM

-{ Quote: "Wow, that's crazy stuff. Volume {<removed>}? machine information: <removed>?" }-I edited the log and put the text "<removed>", as like many on this forum I am paranoid about my privacy/security :)

I do have Look 'n' Stop as my firewall, and have tried running SPD with LnS disabled, but it didn't work. No LnS alerts were displayed either.

However, just after I replied to Pete's post I rebooted my machine and tried to do a Now->Full backup which failed as the original Continuous backup was already in progress. Now, I haven't got a clue what made it suddenly work that time, but subsequent attempts to run a backup have failed. I checked the log for the time is succeeded, and it kept trying different methods for backing up. It also mentioned the VSS was in a bad state. I will post a full log of the time it was successful once I have gone through it removing Volume and machine information :)

I do have quite a few Services disabled or set to Manual (to minimize the number of unnecessary processes running on my machine), so can I ask what services SPD relies on and do they have to be set to Automatic ?

I am also running Kaspersky Anti-Virus 7.0.0.125, but I believe Pete is also running that AV, which tends to rule that out as the culprit.

I have a backup from another imaging app (Image For Windows), so I will try reverting to that point in time before installing SPD again to test it, in case something else has got on my system to cause problems.

-{ Quote: "On to ImageManager question - the installer for ImageManager is available on the recovery environment CD. You have to request a full eval to get access to the ISO for this CD if you want to try this out. I'll see about have it posted so you can just download the sucker. Um, also, relating to the VSS vs non-VSS options within Continuous Incremental jobs - the thing is that when you take a VSS incremental backup, it's always at least a few hundred KB in size, whereas if you're not so concerned about VSS we give you the option (you can turn this on or off) to have many of your intra-daily incrementals taken without VSS, which results in smaller incremental image sizes as well as faster imaging (as there's no VSS quiescence going on at the time they're taken). Such non-VSS incrementals still capture the filesystem in a nice flushed state." }- It would be great if I could try ImageManager. I have already applied for a full eval before version 3 was released, but specifically mentioned I was only interested in version 3. Mike Kunz contacted me to ask how I would be using the software, but I have yet to receive the full eval (maybe he didn't like my reply ;D ).

-{ Quote: "The verify uses CRC32 hashing to test every byte in your image file to ensure that nothing has changed." }-CRC32 hashing can result in collisions every now and then, which means that an image which passes verification could in fact be corrupted. I understand most people use compression and/or encryption which would help to show up any corruption, but the verification algorithm used is flawed. I would like to see byte-by-byte verification included in a future version.

Peter2150

August 29th, 2007, 08:18 PM

Hi Defenestration

I no longer have KAV on my system, but I did have it when I had 2.5 on the system and there were no issues. The services issue is another matter. I don't mess with the services.

Personally I don't see the crc check as a big deal. Before the verification was in the gui, I didn't bother. I just mounted the image, and if i could pull 2 or 3 files out, it was good. A restore never failed. My feeling is if a more robust check slowed things down it wouldn't be worth it.

Pete

grnxnm

August 29th, 2007, 09:34 PM

Yeah, if you disable ShadowProtect and VSS services (ShadowProtectSvc.exe - which you should see twice in your process list, vsnapvss.exe, vssvc.exe, etc) then you'll have all kinds of problems and you should expect failures.

grnxnm

August 29th, 2007, 09:40 PM

@Defenestration

Yup, a larger hash would be nice (perhaps we'll add one in the future), but the only hash that avoids collisions altogether is a hash that's as large as the data that's being hashed.... which isn't very useful.

Here's (http://forums.storagecraft.com/Forums/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=927) a little discussion on this topic.

In practice, corruption is immediately detected by the decompressor first. If corruption somehow managed to corrupt the data while maintaining the integrity of the compressed data stream (extremely unlikely) then CRC32 will catch it. The combination of these two tests is significantly less likely to miss corruption due to a crc32 collision.

If you're really worried about this, please, by all means, use a different product. Or just flip on compression and encryption and you'll have triple verification.

From what little you posted of your log, I can't really tell much about the error. It does look like something is preventing the backup from occurring but I have no idea what that may be. It's my opinion that this is very likely caused by some other software and a poor interaction between it and ShadowProtect.

You must enable all of the "StorageCraft *" and "ShadowProtect *" services (should be Automatic start - start them after setting to Automatic), as well as the "MS Software Shadow Copy Provider" and "Volume Shadow Copy" services (these two should be Manual start).

grnxnm

August 29th, 2007, 10:15 PM

Yeah, regarding CRC32 collisions, you really have to consider the use case.

For a collision to occur, the following events have to take place:

Actual corruption of the image file has to occur. This event in and of itself is actually fairly rare, especially with journaled file systems which, for the most part, relegate the causes of corruption to hardware. If it was common, none of us would be using hard disks. The odds that corruption will occur depend on the quality and age of the hard disk, the size of the image file (the percentage of the disk that's consumed by image data - the larger the file the more likely that it can become corrupt), environment, and usage (a disk that's being pounded 24x7 is more likely to experience failures than one that's sitting on a shelf). Let's be pessimistic and say that the odds that an image file will become corrupt as it sits on your hard disk are 1 in 100.

The hash of the region of image data that was corrupted would have to generate the same value as the it did before the data was corrupted. Odds of this are roughly 1 in 4,294,967,295 (I say roughly because this assumes CRC32 generates uniformly distributed hashes).

If you don't encrypt or compress the image (which results in extra degrees of verification), then the odds that a hash collision will actually be a problem for you are roughly 1 in 400 billion (4294967295 x 100). In other words, you should start worrying about this around the time that you've actually created 400 billion image files.

However, let's not forget use case, because after all, most users DO compress their image files because it turns out that compressed images are generated FASTER than uncompressed images, and they take up less disk space. In other words, there are few reasons not to compress. And it's the default option in ShadowProtect. Now before CRC32 is calculated, the decryptor (yet another layer of verify) and decompressor consume the data stream, and immediately detect corruption. The odds that the data stream can be corrupted in such a way that the corruption gets past the decryptor and decompressor are pretty remote. I haven't done the math to figure out the exact probability, but it's a gross underestimate to say that it'd be a 1 in 100 chance that such corruption would go unnoticed. Same for the decryptor. So with this incredibly low-ball/pessimistic probility, you're still talking about a 1 in 40 trillion chance of a collision actually being a problem for you, or 1 in 4 quadrillion chance if you're using both compression and encryption. And again, that's a low ball estimate. I'm pretty confident that if I worked the math on the probability of the decompressor and decrypor missing corruption that it'd be a much longer odd.

So, if you're concerned, just flip on compression and encryption, and don't sweat it until you've generated 4 quadrillion image files. Hmm... y'know, I think it might (currently) be impossible to even have 4 quadrillion decent-sized image files - there's not sufficient storage space on this planet for that much data.

But, all that being said, I think it might not be a bad idea to add a SHA-1 or SHA-256 hash, and maybe let the user pick the hash level.

Defenestration

August 30th, 2007, 07:13 AM

Pete - May I ask what AV you use now ?

grnxnm - I never disabled any of the services after installing SPD, but I had previously disabled the MS Software Shadow Copy Provider. However, even after enabling this service I still can't get it to work properly. I think I'm going to go ahead an re-image with a known good image and start testing SPD again from there.

It might be worth including a check in SP to make sure all the required services are enabled (and have correct startup mode).

Re. the hashing algorithm - I'm not saying introduce SHA-1 or SHA-256 (although giving the user the option would be nice), or to get rid of CRC-32, but rather to have an additional byte-by-byte comparison after the image is created (by de-compressing the image stream) to compare the original source with the backed up data. This would guarantee that you have an exact image of the source at the time the image was taken.

Obviously, this byte-by-byte comparison cannot be performed later on as the original source data will have most likely changed, and this is where the CRC-32 checksum comes into play, to verify the image when the original source is no longer present. It would just be an extra layer of security to guarantee the image created is an EXACT match of the snapshot in time.

Peter2150

August 30th, 2007, 10:15 AM

-{ Quote: "Pete - May I ask what AV you use now ?

grnxnm - I never disabled any of the services after installing SPD, but I had previously disabled the MS Software Shadow Copy Provider. However, even after enabling this service I still can't get it to work properly. I think I'm going to go ahead an re-image with a known good image and start testing SPD again from there.

It might be worth including a check in SP to make sure all the required services are enabled (and have correct startup mode).

Re. the hashing algorithm - I'm not saying introduce SHA-1 or SHA-256 (although giving the user the option would be nice), or to get rid of CRC-32, but rather to have an additional byte-by-byte comparison after the image is created (by de-compressing the image stream) to compare the original source with the backed up data. This would guarantee that you have an exact image of the source at the time the image was taken.

Obviously, this byte-by-byte comparison cannot be performed later on as the original source data will have most likely changed, and this is where the CRC-32 checksum comes into play, to verify the image when the original source is no longer present. It would just be an extra layer of security to guarantee the image created is an EXACT match of the snapshot in time." }-

Hi Defenestration

I am not using any AV or As software. Just using hips and virtualization stuff.

On the other issues, while I can't speak for grnxnm, I can guess the answer. Remember Shadowprotect Desktop/server is targeted at the IT community. It is what they want, that drives the product. I'd almost bet those guy's never tweak or mess with operating system services and could care less having that detected. This is why my advice to people is leave it alone. Software authors assume you are running the operating system as designed.

Same thing on the hash business. Probably so far down in priority to IT types, and hence the same will be true for Storagecraft.

Pete

Defenestration

August 30th, 2007, 10:24 AM

Doing a basic check that the required services are available would be an easy thing to implement and would result in more robust software, with a nice informative error message being displayed instead of it just hanging. While it may be an oversight, and I know no software is perfect, but it's small details like this that make me lose a bit of faith in a product. If they haven't done simple checks like this, what else aren't they checking/doing to make there software more robust.

Peter2150

August 30th, 2007, 10:37 AM

-{ Quote: "Doing a basic check that the required services are available would be an easy thing to implement and would result in more robust software, with a nice informative error message being displayed instead of it just hanging. While it may be an oversight, and I know no software is perfect, but it's small details like this that make me lose a bit of faith in a product. If they haven't done simple checks like this, what else aren't they checking/doing to make there software more robust." }-

True, but they still take time, and cost money. You are missing the point. They do a lot of checks that are necessary, but to do a check that virtually non of their users would need would be a waste. Can you name me any other software, that checks to see if all the services are running. Doubt it.
I still think the gain of turning off services is totally out weighed by the potential problems.

Remember we Wilders types are a very unusual type of user. Big market for some products, and they listen, but we are a miniscule market for others, and they most likely won't. Let me give you another example. I use a program called Paperport. Fairly popular business software. I can almost bet they don't test. There spec is Windows XP. That means as Microsoft makes it not as we modify it. I'd bet here also if you suggested they check that all services are running, you'd get a polite reply and that would be the end of it.

Pete

Defenestration

August 30th, 2007, 11:55 AM

Windows usually requires certain services to run normally. Beyond that, some are complete unnecessary. So, I'm not saying test all services are running, but ones specific to an app and which cause that app to hang if they are not running should be tested IMO, to make the design more robust.

grnxnm stated himself that aside from SP's own services, both "MS Software Shadow Copy Provider" and "Volume Shadow Copy" services should be set to Manual start. So, if this is known to be the case then checks should be made to ensure that these two services are set to Manual start at the very least, and preferably also checked to see they are running (if needed for the particular operation).

screamer

August 30th, 2007, 12:35 PM

I'm waiting for the SP ver.3 ISO to be released. Hopefully today.

Question is: How long "should" a restore take of a 35GB System Drive / Image?

System specs in sig.

...screamer

sukarof

August 30th, 2007, 12:45 PM

-{ Quote: "I'm waiting for the SP ver.3 ISO to be released. Hopefully today.

Question is: How long "should" a restore take of a 35GB System Drive / Image?

System specs in sig.

...screamer" }-

I dont know how long it "should" take but I guess it has to do with how fast hard drives and processor one has.
34GB takes 18 minutes for me to image with standard compression for me (when I do a backup in windows Vista and XP)

Peter2150

August 30th, 2007, 12:52 PM

-{ Quote: "Windows usually requires certain services to run normally. Beyond that, some are complete unnecessary. So, I'm not saying test all services are running, but ones specific to an app and which cause that app to hang if they are not running should be tested IMO, to make the design more robust.

grnxnm stated himself that aside from SP's own services, both "MS Software Shadow Copy Provider" and "Volume Shadow Copy" services should be set to Manual start. So, if this is known to be the case then checks should be made to ensure that these two services are set to Manual start at the very least, and preferably also checked to see they are running (if needed for the particular operation)." }-

Defenestration

I'll tell you the same thing I told another user here. This is a case where IMO doesn't matter. You are going to have to make your mind. Either you can use SP the way it is or not. Because you think the "test" would make the product more robust isn't going to change a thing. That is reality.

Let me amend this a bit. If you come up with a core idea, that would benefit a large audience of IT type users, you can bet they would be interested. But nitty stuff like crc issues and testing that Windows is running the way it was intended rather then how you modified it, just is not going to happen. Least I'd sure bet on that.

Peter2150

August 30th, 2007, 12:55 PM

-{ Quote: "I'm waiting for the SP ver.3 ISO to be released. Hopefully today.

Question is: How long "should" a restore take of a 35GB System Drive / Image?

System specs in sig.

...screamer" }-

Hi Screamer

That is going to vary so much based on details of your system. For me I can image/verify and restore 27gig in about 6-7 minutes for each process.

On the system I am on right at the moment, my AMD machine, the drive has 22Gb. I started a full job this morning. FUll image took 5 mnutes. Incrementals are taking about 6 sec on average. Restores are typically the same, or maybe a half minute slower.

Pete

screamer

August 30th, 2007, 01:18 PM

Right now, to image, it takes 30mins. That's 15min less than ATI. Actually it's the restore I'm concerned with. ATI takes 6hrs for 35GB Image :(

I'm "hoping" that SP can reduce this time by 500% to about 1hr.

I can hope can't I.

...screamer

Peter2150

August 30th, 2007, 01:20 PM

-{ Quote: "Right now, to image, it takes 30mins. That's 15min less than ATI. Actually it's the restore I'm concerned with. ATI takes 6hrs for 35GB Image :(

I'm "hoping" that SP can reduce this time by 500% to about 1hr.

I can hope can't I.

...screamer" }-

I would guess 35 to maybe 40 Pete

You will really love the continous incrementals then.

ErikAlbert

August 30th, 2007, 01:37 PM

-{ Quote: "I'm waiting for the SP ver.3 ISO to be released. Hopefully today.

Question is: How long "should" a restore take of a 35GB System Drive / Image?

System specs in sig.

...screamer" }-
I have a system partition of 11.4gb and I use only the Recovery CD.
Backup time = close to 4 minuts and Restore time = close to 6 minuts.
There are too many factors that influence the backup/restore time. You better test this yourself.
Besides the transfer rate of SP changes constantly. Sometimes 40 MB/second; sometimes 15 MB/second.

Huupi

August 30th, 2007, 02:26 PM

-{ Quote: "I have a system partition of 11.4gb and I use only the Recovery CD.
Backup time = close to 4 minuts and Restore time = close to 6 minuts.
There are too many factors that influence the backup/restore time. You better test this yourself.
Besides the transfer rate of SP changes constantly. Sometimes 40 MB/second; sometimes 15 MB/second." }-

Imaging the hard way[immediate restore] is the only way to know if a image is sound,but as Nate explains afterwards it can detoriate because of diskrot and other compromises,so you never completely safe.

Peter2150

August 30th, 2007, 03:07 PM

-{ Quote: "Imaging the hard way[immediate restore] is the only way to know if a image is sound,but as Nate explains afterwards it can detoriate because of diskrot and other compromises,so you never completely safe." }-

If older images are important, it's not a bad idea to load them up on the system and reimage. I do that with my basic system one's occasionally, although it's primarily for play purposes.

Huupi

August 30th, 2007, 03:56 PM

-{ Quote: "If older images are important, it's not a bad idea to load them up on the system and reimage. I do that with my basic system one's occasionally, although it's primarily for play purposes." }-

Before i image i clean the volume[C with no pers.data] in every possible way,so the only differences in successive images are instals i keep and security updates,because i have FDISR in full swing,i image for this reason about once in every 3 months or lesser and mostly for the fun of it.There is no urgent need for that.I keep a clean install image[only a bold Windows XP],can restore that and bring it current with a current FDISR Archive,once i did it took 16 min.

Defenestration

August 30th, 2007, 05:50 PM

-{ Quote: "But nitty stuff like crc issues and testing that Windows is running the way it was intended rather then how you modified it, just is not going to happen. Least I'd sure bet on that." }-Maybe testing Windows services is a bit "nitty", but making sure the stored image is valid through byte-by-byte comparison is a fundamental objective of a piece of imaging software like SP. Admittedly I am not privvy to the implementation details, so it would be interesting to know what checks are made by SP during (or after) image creation to ensure that the new image is an exact replica of the source data/partition ?

That aside, after a bit of investigation I have found the cause of the problem I've been experiencing with SPD hanging and not being able to create backups. It was because the "COM+ Event System" service was disabled. When this was changed to Manual, the problem disappeared.

BTW, during my investigation I found that SPD still appears to function correctly with the "MS Software Shadow Copy Provider" service disabled, although I only tested that the backup process would start OK.

Defenestration

August 30th, 2007, 06:15 PM

Back to questions about Continuous Incrementals - Am I right in my thinking of how the following scenariosn work:

1) For a schedule with nothing ticked in "Additional Incremental Backups" and Sun ticked in "VSS Incremental Backups" with a Start time of 18:00:00, then a full backup will be created if no previous full image exists. If a full image does already exist, an incremental image will be taken every Sunday at 18:00:00. The images will always be taken using the StorageCraft Volume Snapshot Manager (this is me assuming the "Use VSS" checkbox only applies to "Additional Incremental Backups") ?

2) Alternatively to (1), the same schedule could be achieved by un-ticking all "VSS Incremental Backups" checkboxes, and only ticking the Sun checkbox in "Additional Incremental Backups", with Start and Stop times both set to 18:00:00, and "Use VSS" un-ticked ?

After thinking about it for a bit, I think I'm getting the hang of it. The thing that confused me a bit was that you can have a single schedule which will backup on specific days at a specific time, as well as having it backup on independently specified days at every X minutes between a specified time period.

It also confused me having the group heading "VSS Incremental Backups" instead of something like "Daily Incremental Backups". If

If the option "Use VSS" also applies to the group "VSS Incremental Backups", then it would be more intuitive if it was moved outside the group box.

BTW, why can't the minutes between backups be entered directly (you have to use the up/down arrows) ?

Defenestration

August 30th, 2007, 06:29 PM

Is it normal for incremental images to be about 200KB-300KB in size (using StorageCraft Volume Snapshot Manager) for a Continuous Incremental schedule on my system partition if, after an image has been taken, I immediately zoom the system clock forward to a few seconds before the next run time (ie. so there is only about 5-10 seconds between images) ?

The same images taken with VSS are about 9MB in size. Given this massive size difference, why would anyone ever want to use VSS ?

Peter2150

August 30th, 2007, 06:51 PM

Hi Defenestration

Here is how I set up.

1 Run backup wizard and select the source
2.Select the destination location. Note you can double lick on the file name and change it.
3. Select Continous Incrementals (this assumes you have imagemanager installed)
4. I leave sunday checked and then Monday-Friday
5 I then set my start to 9 AM and Stop to 5 AM
6 Minutes between backups 15
7. I didn't check the VSS box
8 On options pages I leave defaults
9 On the summary page I just click finish

I then have image manager set up kick off after 5 and keep incrementals 1 day.

What image manager will do is collapse all the days incrementals into one for the day. Then one for the week, and then one for the month. All automatically

Today the 15 increments sure helped me. Had a database go corrupt. Mounted the most recent increment and extacted the file, and was good to o.

Pete

Peter2150

August 30th, 2007, 06:52 PM

The size of the incrementals will be a function of how much changed. They typically take about 5 seconds to run on my machine.

Defenestration

August 30th, 2007, 07:09 PM

Hi Pete,

Do you only choose to have it run between 9-5 because that is the time period when you do all your critical work ?

Reason I ask is because I often work varied hours, so was considering just setting the start time to 08:00:00 and the end time to 07:59.59 with 15 minute increments. I figure that when my machine is switched off, SP obviously can't run, but I will be protected with backups every 15 minutes while the machine is on.

How much do the incrementals collapse (eg. if all 33 incrementals for the day were 1 MB each, how big would the resultant collapsed image be on average ?) ?

BTW, Image Manager is not a pre-requisite for using Continuous Incrementals, although you obviously lose the collapse feature.

Peter2150

August 30th, 2007, 07:51 PM

-{ Quote: "Hi Pete,

Do you only choose to have it run between 9-5 because that is the time period when you do all your critical work ?

Reason I ask is because I often work varied hours, so was considering just setting the start time to 08:00:00 and the end time to 07:59.59 with 15 minute increments. I figure that when my machine is switched off, SP obviously can't run, but I will be protected with backups every 15 minutes while the machine is on.

How much do the incrementals collapse (eg. if all 33 incrementals for the day were 1 MB each, how big would the resultant collapsed image be on average ?) ?

BTW, Image Manager is not a pre-requisite for using Continuous Incrementals, although you obviously lose the collapse feature." }-

Yes I chose 9-5 because that is my work time. What I do at night is quite as critical

My incrementals today (27 of them) are from 15 Meg to 77 Meg(after a reboot) and that all collapsed into 1 file of 182.7 meg. I am keeping the individial incrementals 2 days.

You are right about the image manager. But it is invaluable for keeping things clean.

Pete

Empath

August 31st, 2007, 02:29 AM

:-[ :-[

That's a terrible thing to happen. I thought I was in another thread, and posted something uncomplimentary about the wrong protect.

Please pardon my error.

:-[

grnxnm

August 31st, 2007, 01:36 PM

-{ Quote: "
BTW, Image Manager is not a pre-requisite for using Continuous Incrementals, although you obviously lose the collapse feature." }-

Actually, yes, you really *should* use ImageManager if you intend to set up a continuous incremental job.

grnxnm

August 31st, 2007, 01:40 PM

-{ Quote: "Is it normal for incremental images to be about 200KB-300KB in size (using StorageCraft Volume Snapshot Manager) for a Continuous Incremental schedule on my system partition if, after an image has been taken, I immediately zoom the system clock forward to a few seconds before the next run time (ie. so there is only about 5-10 seconds between images) ?

The same images taken with VSS are about 9MB in size. Given this massive size difference, why would anyone ever want to use VSS ?" }-

First off, if you want to manually provoke another incremental (without waiting for the schedule to trigger it) you can just right-click on the job in the Jobs list and select "Incremental Backup" and it'll make another incremental immediately. No need to mess with your clock.

VSS will quiesce any VSS-aware applications (called "VSS Writers"), and so if you care about this (usually only people that are actually using VSS Writers like SQL Server or Exchange Server, etc, care about this) then your VSS backups are generally better than non-VSS backups. This also explains why non-VSS incremental backups are smaller (while the file system is flushed, VSS writer apps are not quiesced for non-VSS incremental backups).

Defenestration

August 31st, 2007, 06:19 PM

Thanks for the info grnxnm, particularly that I don't need to whizz my clock forward to get it to take another incremental. :-[ ;D

I'm waiting on the full eval which I should have soon. However, I am loving the Continuous Incrementals already and from what I can see, this software is likely to be an integral part of my backup strategy for my most critical data. :)

I think I'll stick to non-VSS backups though, for obvious reasons.

Defenestration

August 31st, 2007, 07:46 PM

I've run into a little problem. I have a single Continuous Incrementals back schedule which is set to perform a backup every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day (ie. Start time= 08:00:00, Stop time=07.59.59), every day of the week. "Use VSS" is not selected. All checkboxes in upper "VSS Incremental Backups" group are not selected.

The first time it was run, a full image was created, followed by incremental images throughout the rest of the day. Here's the problem though, when midnight struck and a new day started SPD started to take a full image.

According to the manual, for Continuous Incrementals schedule:

-{ Quote: "A full backup image is created only once. Incrementals are then taken on a daily basis at any given time. " }-

So, why is it trying to take a full backup again ?

Defenestration

August 31st, 2007, 07:51 PM

After looking at the log, I think I've just answered my own question:

31-Aug-2007 23:47:28 service 100 VDIFF was disabled and then enabled on C:\

I gather that a full backup is taken again when VDIFF is disabled ?

The odd thing is that I didn't manually disable it (or at least not knowingly).

What are the ways that VDIFF can be disabled ?

Defenestration

August 31st, 2007, 07:58 PM

There is a minor cosmetic bug with the text on the Basic Properties tab of a job schedule, under the heading "Schedule". For my schedule above ((ie. Start time= 08:00:00, Stop time=07.59.59)), it says "Trigger every 15 minutes. Do not trigger from 08:00:00 till 07:59:59". The start and the stop time are the wrong way round though - It should read "Trigger every 15 minutes. Do not trigger from 07:59:59 till 08:00:00".

Peter2150

August 31st, 2007, 11:13 PM

If you run continous incrementals without imagemanager, your incrementals will pile up. To start I'd cut it back to something less then 24hours, and probably would be smart to wait until you get the full cd and can install the whole package.

Pete

grnxnm

September 1st, 2007, 03:23 PM

-{ Quote: "I've run into a little problem. I have a single Continuous Incrementals back schedule which is set to perform a backup every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day (ie. Start time= 08:00:00, Stop time=07.59.59), every day of the week. "Use VSS" is not selected. All checkboxes in upper "VSS Incremental Backups" group are not selected.

The first time it was run, a full image was created, followed by incremental images throughout the rest of the day. Here's the problem though, when midnight struck and a new day started SPD started to take a full image.

According to the manual, for Continuous Incrementals schedule:

So, why is it trying to take a full backup again ?" }-

Yeah, we found this one and have fixed it. What happened is that an unrelated fix was added right before release and it had a side effect that turned off the "crash-proof/auto-heal incremental" feature. This feature should by default ALWAYS be on for continuous-incremental backup jobs. The basic idea is that in order to make fast incrementals, ShadowProtect maintains a tiny compressed bitmap, in memory, of the sectors that have changed since the last snapshot. When you make a new incremental it takes a snapshot and then backs up only the sectors that changed between the previous snapshot and the current snapshot. The problem with this technique is that if your machine powers off (has an ungraceful shutdown) this in-memory map is lost (if you shutdown gracefully it's saved to the .idx file in the root of your volume and re-loaded when your system comes back up) and so when it boots back up after a crash/power-loss the next incremental has to be made using a diff technique (and at this time the in-memory tracking is turned back on so that subsequent incrementals will be fast again). This capability to continue making incrementals even if a power-off occurs causing the loss of the in-memory map is the "auto-heal incremental recovery" or "crash proof incremental" feature. The really silly thing about this bug is that all of the functionality is there, but that in the wizard when you create a continuous incremental backup job it turns OFF this auto-heal option and disables the checkbox so that you can't override it. It was a very simple fix, but sometimes stuff like this gets out the door. Anyway, the net result is that if you perform any type of operation which interupts the incremental tracking then continuous incremental jobs (without the fix) will make a new base image. With the fix they'll continue making incrementals. By the way, booting the recovery environment will also wipe out the incremental tracking as whenever you boot the recovery environment it will delete all .idx files in the roots of all volumes. This is to prevent the possibility that an incremental will be generated with bad data because if you change data on a volume while within the WinPE environment, the changes you make are not known to stcvsm.sys on your normal OS (as you didn't boot your normal OS).

So, that's all a long way to say, "You're right, it's a minor issue that we've also discovered, and fixed, and the fix will be available shortly."

Defenestration

September 1st, 2007, 09:28 PM

Thanks for the detailed description of the problem - I appreciate the time taken to describe the problem, why it occurred, and how you have fixed it.

From your description, I understand that when this auto heal feature is enabled the diff technique will not require any more disk space than a normal incremental. It's just that the diff technique will take a lot longer to complete (ie. similar to a full backup) ?

grnxnm

September 2nd, 2007, 11:46 PM

-{ Quote: "Thanks for the detailed description of the problem - I appreciate the time taken to describe the problem, why it occurred, and how you have fixed it.

From your description, I understand that when this auto heal feature is enabled the diff technique will not require any more disk space than a normal incremental. It's just that the diff technique will take a lot longer to complete (ie. similar to a full backup) ?" }-

Exactly so. And actually there's a fringe benefit to the diff technique as it basically does a verify on the previous image files as part of the diff operation.

fce

September 5th, 2007, 02:24 PM

is there any option in SP ver3 to create bootable disc same as ATI 10?

if yes, does it work same as ATI bootable rescue disc?

Peter2150

September 5th, 2007, 02:39 PM

-{ Quote: "is there any option in SP ver3 to create bootable disc same as ATI 10?

if yes, does it work same as ATI bootable rescue disc?" }-

When you download it, it comes as an ISO. You burn that to CD. That CD is both the install disk for the desktop version, and the recovery CD all in one.

In my humble opinion it works better than the Acronis CD as it is windows based instead of Linux. But then there are those around here who might suggest I am biased. (Which I am);D

Pete

lucas1985

September 5th, 2007, 02:52 PM

I've requested an evaluation of SPD3. I will evaluate it and share my findings.
One question, SP is restricted to Windows' filesystems, right?

fce

September 5th, 2007, 02:56 PM

-{ Quote: "When you download it, it comes as an ISO. You burn that to CD. That CD is both the install disk for the desktop version, and the recovery CD all in one.

In my humble opinion it works better than the Acronis CD as it is windows based instead of Linux. But then there are those around here who might suggest I am biased. (Which I am);D

Pete" }-

i dowloaded trial version....only SP_Desktop_Setup_3, there's no trial version for SP bootable rescue disc?

Brian K

September 5th, 2007, 03:32 PM

I downloaded the trial version yesterday. I was surprised how much it resembled Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery. In GUI, wizards, performance and features. Nice app.

Defenestration

September 5th, 2007, 03:39 PM

-{ Quote: "Yeah, we found this one and have fixed it. So, that's all a long way to say, "You're right, it's a minor issue that we've also discovered, and fixed, and the fix will be available shortly."" }-Any news on when this might be available ?

Huupi

September 5th, 2007, 03:44 PM

-{ Quote: "When you download it, it comes as an ISO. You burn that to CD. That CD is both the install disk for the desktop version, and the recovery CD all in one.

In my humble opinion it works better than the Acronis CD as it is windows based instead of Linux. But then there are those around here who might suggest I am biased. (Which I am);D

Pete" }-

So what, biased toward the best.........i can't blame you !

Peter2150

September 5th, 2007, 03:58 PM

-{ Quote: "i dowloaded trial version....only SP_Desktop_Setup_3, there's no trial version for SP bootable rescue disc?" }-

Look for the link to request an evaluation of the full version. The reason they do that is they have to pay a fee for every copy that is downloaded to microsoft for the winpe environment.

Pete

fce

September 5th, 2007, 04:31 PM

-{ Quote: "Look for the link to request an evaluation of the full version. The reason they do that is they have to pay a fee for every copy that is downloaded to microsoft for the winpe environment.

Pete" }-

thanks Pete!

I'm trying now this flavor of the month ;D

I run SP backup and so far so good. I'll read this thread later....i want to know how this SP3 better than RBRx ;)

Brian K

September 5th, 2007, 08:34 PM

Pete,

Can you get SP to verify each image at the time of creation? I couldn't find an auto setting. I did find a manual verify setting but surely there is an auto one somewhere.

Peter2150

September 5th, 2007, 08:45 PM

-{ Quote: "Pete,

Can you get SP to verify each image at the time of creation? I couldn't find an auto setting. I did find a manual verify setting but surely there is an auto one somewhere." }-

You know, I don't think there is a way to make it part of the job. Funny thing, is before they put the verify in, I just mounted the image, and if I could extract a file from it, it was good.

Peter2150

September 5th, 2007, 08:46 PM

-{ Quote: "thanks Pete!

I'm trying now this flavor of the month ;D

I run SP backup and so far so good. I'll read this thread later....i want to know how this SP3 better than RBRx ;)" }-

Hi Fce

You really need to slow down and really dig in and learn, the diffference between imaging programs and programs like Rollback. Comparing them is like comparing apples and oranges.

Pete

huntnyc

September 5th, 2007, 09:24 PM

@Brian,

To my knowledge, there is no way to make the verify command a part of a backup job as you can with other imaging programs. Seems like that would have been a simple thing to do but I can say I have never had a bad image with this app but the feature is desirable and preferred to make this great app even more efficient.

Gary

Brian K

September 5th, 2007, 09:44 PM

Thanks Gary,

Recently a member in the Radified forum reported writing unverified Ghost 12 images to an external HD. When she tried to restore an image it wouldn't. Further investigation showed that none of the images would verify. The cause was a failing external HD. This would have been discovered earlier if she had chosen to verify at the time of image creation.

Luckily she had an old image on another external HD.

huntnyc

September 5th, 2007, 09:51 PM

@Brian,

Excellent example of why this should be a helpful feature. That is one of th efew things I miss about not using some of the other imaging programs.

Gary

kennyboy

September 5th, 2007, 10:15 PM

I requested an evaluation of the full version 2 weeks ago, and have had no reply. Guess I dont fulfill their criteria whatever they may be.

Would have been nice to have had a reply though......???

Peter2150

September 5th, 2007, 10:36 PM

-{ Quote: "Thanks Gary,

Recently a member in the Radified forum reported writing unverified Ghost 12 images to an external HD. When she tried to restore an image it wouldn't. Further investigation showed that none of the images would verify. The cause was a failing external HD. This would have been discovered earlier if she had chosen to verify at the time of image creation.

Luckily she had an old image on another external HD." }-

That shouldn't be by luck, but by design. An imaged verified at the time it's made, could also be in trouble if the drive started to fail. I keep images and FDISR archives not only on a 2nd internal drive, but an external drive.

Also one can probably alway find a stray example. But in use of the program, I just haven't found this to be a big issue. SP is reliable.

Brian K

September 5th, 2007, 11:28 PM

I just had a look at the Recovery Environment. Drive letters are assigned sequentially (C D E F G etc) and don't necessarily match the drive letters seen in WinXP. Is this how you are seeing drive letters?

From Ghost 10 onwards, Ghost reads the MountedDevices registry key and assigns the same letters in the Recovery Environment as are present in WinXP. On the surface this seems a good idea but some Ghost 10 users couldn't see their external HDs from the Recovery Environment due to this measure. A solution has been discovered but the way SP assigns drive letters is preferable. Ghost 9 does it this way, sequentially, and there were no problems seeing external HDs from the Ghost 9 Recovery Environment.

fce

September 6th, 2007, 07:04 AM

i want to use SP3 weekly incremental backup schedule, my question is if i delete older backup (automatic) do i still need to run windows defrag or there's SP feature to do this (automatic defrag)?

i can't find any big advantage of SP3 vs. RBRx....RBRx speed is really tough to beat. If horizon data release some cure to chkdsk issue i will never leave RBRx :)

in my honest opinion (for now after 2days of playing SP3), RBRx > SP3=ATI :lurking:

kennyboy

September 6th, 2007, 07:23 AM

-{ Quote: "Hi Fce

You really need to slow down and really dig in and learn, the diffference between imaging programs and programs like Rollback. Comparing them is like comparing apples and oranges.

Pete" }-

@fce

The above is the best advice you will get. You need BOTH types of software. Recovery is NOT the same as Imaging, and will not save you when your HD fails!!

Huupi

September 6th, 2007, 08:42 AM

-{ Quote: "@fce

The above is the best advice you will get. You need BOTH types of software. Recovery is NOT the same as Imaging, and will not save you when your HD fails!!" }-

And even imaging don't save you if part. tables are disrupted.Only chance then to recover is zeroing the disk to begin with a clean slate and restore an previously made image.Bottomline is if you have solid images you can always recover,be it a diskfailure or systemfailure,if you have also current FDISR archives then it goes all the way faster to restore back to the current state.Normally from total failure to current state takes 25 min.But as already said be carefull with partitioning.......ask Peter !

Peter2150

September 6th, 2007, 08:48 AM

-{ Quote: "i want to use SP3 weekly incremental backup schedule, my question is if i delete older backup (automatic) do i still need to run windows defrag or there's SP feature to do this (automatic defrag)?

i can't find any big advantage of SP3 vs. RBRx....RBRx speed is really tough to beat. If horizon data release some cure to chkdsk issue i will never leave RBRx :)

in my honest opinion (for now after 2days of playing SP3), RBRx > SP3=ATI :lurking:" }-

If you use imagemanger and continous incrementals, you don't want to defrag. It is comparing sectors, and a defrag will change a bunch of them.

You are comparing speed of SP3 vs RBRx is like comparing the speed of a Race Car against a bulldozer. It's meaningless because they do completely different things.

Slow it down, read carefully what imaging is and why one does it, and then do the same for both Rollback and FDISR(I know you had problems)

THey are all different, and you need to understand them to see how they fit whatever it is you are trying to do.

Pete

Defenestration

September 6th, 2007, 12:31 PM

-{ Quote: "@Brian,

To my knowledge, there is no way to make the verify command a part of a backup job as you can with other imaging programs. Seems like that would have been a simple thing to do but I can say I have never had a bad image with this app but the feature is desirable and preferred to make this great app even more efficient.

Gary" }-As I mentioned earlier in the thread, SPD should have an option for a byte-by-byte verify with source on image creation, as Image For Windows has. This helps to ensure that the image is at least written to the target successfully.

sukarof

September 6th, 2007, 01:28 PM

I notice that I have a process named "imagemanager.exe" loaded all the time, does "imagemangerclient.exe" have to be loaded if I want imagemanager to collapse the incremental´s? If so, what is imagemanager.exe? I thought that one took care of the scheduling of the tasks in imagemanager.

I ask because my incrementals didnt collapse at the specified time. I was connected to my localhost.

Peter2150

September 6th, 2007, 02:01 PM

-{ Quote: "I notice that I have a process named "imagemanager.exe" loaded all the time, does "imagemangerclient.exe" have to be loaded if I want imagemanager to collapse the incremental´s? If so, what is imagemanager.exe? I thought that one took care of the scheduling of the tasks in imagemanager.

I ask because my incrementals didnt collapse at the specified time. I was connected to my localhost." }-

When you setup the schedule in SP3, select continuous Incrementals. I start them at 9:15 and end at 4:30pm.

Then in imagemanger I have it set to run at 5:00pm. It collapses the incrementals.

If you are still having a problem, I will post my exact steps and settings.

Pete

Peter2150

September 6th, 2007, 02:03 PM

-{ Quote: "As I mentioned earlier in the thread, SPD should have an option for a byte-by-byte verify with source on image creation, as Image For Windows has. This helps to ensure that the image is at least written to the target successfully." }-

Have to wait and see what grnxnm says, but I bet there just hasn't been much demand, so priorities go to where the demand is.

ErikAlbert

September 6th, 2007, 03:46 PM

ShadowProtect Desktop v3 seems to have another activation method or something like that. What is the improvement and what are the possiblities without getting activation problems ?

1. In case the harddisk is formatted or zero-ed (same computer).
2. In case SP3 is installed in more than one FDISR/RBRx-snapshot (same computer).
3. In case SP3 is un-installed AND re-installed on the same harddisk or the same FDISR/RBRx-snapshot. (same computer).

Regarding SP2 :
If I uninstall SP2 does this also reset my activation, so that I can re-install SP2 without activation problems ?

Atomas31

September 6th, 2007, 04:02 PM

Hi Erik,

I would also like to know because right now I have activation problem on one of my 3 FD-ISR snapshots with SP 3.0...

I could activate my SP 3.0 on 2 of my snapshots but not on the third one and like always there support s*cks...

After I report that problem (and asking almost the same questions than you Erik) they wrote the following to me :
"Our system allows many re-activations. The issue is with ISR representing a brand new machine each time. With all of our customers, we recommend that they install and activate once, take an image and store that initial image somewhere safe. This saves tons of time in that the user does not need to reinstall Windows, but rather restore a good image. It’s a matter of minutes instead of hours.

In regards to FD-ISR, ShadowProtect through imaging does what FD-ISR does with snap-shotting, so we’re not sure why you need both to work so closely together. You may need to pick one technology or the other. You always have the option of taking a cold image backup through the recovery environment of each snapshot on your machine.

We do not consider this as a bug and are not planning on fixing this. We will not render the product completely open for massive abuse like is being done with other products such as ShadowUser.

If you are migrating to another machine, you have several options, you can deactivate the license on one machine and activate it on another. If your machine dies, you can send us an email and we will update the activations. However, we will not allow abuse. "

No need to say that I send them an email (in fact, 2 since then) to tell them to update my activations but since no more answers (and naturally no update of my activations as far as I know)...

Atomas31

prius04

September 6th, 2007, 04:19 PM

-{ Quote: "...No need to say that I send them an email (in fact, 2 since then) to tell them to update my activations but since no more answers (and naturally no update of my activations as far as I know)..." }-
I hope the folks at SC realize (which is not to imply they care one way or the other) that it's precisely this issue that has made me hesitate to purchase SP3 Desktop.

I can fully understand the need to prevent piracy but if they're going to use the current method to do so, they need to be a bit more responsive to any activation issues that might arise for legitimate purchasers of their product.

Just my $.02....

ErikAlbert

September 6th, 2007, 04:28 PM

-{ Quote: "
I can fully understand the need to prevent piracy but if they're going to use the current method to do so, they need to be a bit more responsive to any activation issues that might arise for legitimate purchasers of their product.
" }-
You got that right. StorageCraft created the problem, not the user, he paid to stay out of trouble.
In the beginning, I was the ONLY ONE with an activation problem according ShadowProtect ::) , but the row gets longer and longer. They probably don't even have enough time anymore to fix user's activation problems.
That's what you get when you have a crippled activation method.

ErikAlbert

September 6th, 2007, 04:45 PM

-{ Quote: "Hi Erik,
I would also like to know because right now I have activation problem on one of my 3 FD-ISR snapshots with SP 3.0...
" }-
That's because the activation of SP3 is NOT based on real hardware identification. SC calls it a "Machine ID", but that is not true.
I had two different "Machine IDs" on the SAME computer, SC thought I was a pirate. That is the ultimate proof that SC doesn't use a REAL "Machine ID", they use something else and nobody knows what of course, it's a secret. LOL.
If I have 10 snapshots, I get 10 different "Machine IDs". ::)
SC is very good in creating Image Backup software, but their activation method sucks.

One tip : use copy/update from the second snapshot to the snapshot with activation problem.
You have to re-install the rest of the snapshot of course, because copy/update creates IDENTICAL snapshots, but most likely your activation problem will be solved. Test it out and take your precautions.

Peter2150

September 6th, 2007, 04:46 PM

Stay cool guys. I've requested help on the issue.

Pete

Bio-Hazard

September 6th, 2007, 05:43 PM

This is very intresting thread. I would like to know what happens with this activation business.

I have to say that SP 3 is working fine here and is quicker than the earlier version.

Longboard

September 6th, 2007, 05:53 PM

Just lurking and watching:
-{ Quote: "I had two different "Machine IDs" on the SAME computer, SC thought I was a pirate. That is the ultimate proof that SC doesn't use a REAL "Machine ID", they use something else and nobody knows what of course, it's a secret. LOL.
If I have 10 snapshots, I get 10 different "Machine IDs". " }-

Eh? If that is true:
That of course is absurd.
IS there any other software that does this: I think not ?

Is it a problem with FDISR copy technology?
Where is SP getting and storing the "machineUID" that FDISR is not seeing/copying it.?
?at boot what has changed in an fdisr snap to generate the wrong UID
?different snaps in FDISR maybe configured differently: part of the joy.
I see That as why and how SP and FDISR can and possibly should should exist together as complementary tools for some.
This is not some trick with VM's to clone 100's of devices/systems to different machines to "abuse" SP.
Where is the Unique machine ID?

If the e-mail above is reproduced correctly that is really quite offensive: guilty by implication!
:ouch:

ErikAlbert

September 6th, 2007, 06:47 PM

-{ Quote: "Just lurking and watching:

Eh? If that is true:
That of course is absurd.
IS there any other software that does this: I think not ?

Is it a problem with FDISR copy technology?
Where is SP getting and storing the "machineUID" that FDISR is not seeing/copying it.?
?at boot what has changed in an fdisr snap to generate the wrong UID
?different snaps in FDISR maybe configured differently: part of the joy.
I see That as why and how SP and FDISR can and possibly should should exist together as complementary tools for some.
This is not some trick with VM's to clone 100's of devices/systems to different machines to "abuse" SP.
Where is the Unique machine ID?

If the e-mail above is reproduced correctly that is really quite offensive: guilty by implication!
:ouch:" }-
There is nothing wrong with FDISR.

You have to make a distinction between :

1. When you use the copy/update function of FDISR, ShadowProtect will be copied to another snapshot, that's not an installation, that is making a COPY.
This way you won't have an activation problem. This also counts for FDISR-archives. At least that's what I assume, because I can't test it thoroughly, because the activation is so fragile.

2. If you boot in a snapshot and you INSTALL ShadowProtect, you won't have an activation problem either, but only the very first time.
If you boot in a second snapshot and INSTALL ShadowProtect again, you have an activation problem, because each snapshot has its own "Machine ID". That is a serious restriction for FDISR-users.

3. If you IMAGE your harddisk with SP installed and you restore that image, you won't have an activation problem either.

4. If you format or zero your harddisk, where SP was installed and you INSTALL ShadowProtect again, I assume that you have also an activation problem, because the second install has a different "Machine ID", than the first install.

5. If you uninstall and install SP again without formatting your harddisk, you won't have an activation problem, unless the activation counter stops your activation.

Keep also in mind, that StorageCraft COUNTS the number of activations.
So even when everything is OK, the counter can terminate your activation, because you reached the limit.

I can only test this, when I have an agreement with StorageCraft to reset my activation over and over again until all tests are finished. Besides that's not my job, StorageCraft can do these tests also. :)

Atomas31

September 6th, 2007, 07:44 PM

Well concerning my activation problem, here's what happens :

I have in total 3 snapshots created with First-Defense - ISR in ONE and ONLY computer.
I activate my SP 3.0 in my primary snapshot.
I boot on my second snapshot and activated my SP 3.0 (still without problem).
I boot on my third snapshot and try to activated my SP 3.0 - that didn't work. Thinking it was your server that had problem and also because I couldn't belieive my eyes, I retry right after that a few times with no luck.
I reboot on my primary snapshot, send a first email about my problems than. I didn't reboot on my third snapshots since then and never try to activate my SP 3.0 on this snapshot until I receive an answer from you (wich wasn't positive)...

Now, I just finally received an answer :
"Our licensing computer has identified you are a security risk. It shows that you had a successful activation at 12:59 9/2/2007. It then shows you reactivated it 3 more times within 10 minutes. And then failed to re-activate 2 more times.

Until I can prove otherwise to our activation team, you will not receive any further activations of the product. If you wish, we will completely refund your money and you can find another product that allows you to activate and run in the configuration you desire."

That is in no way a way to tread a paying customer!!! They almost accusing me to be a thief when I have only one and only one computer. And, even more insulting, I have to defend myself with proof of my innocence... Very insulting and unaceptable!!!

They might have one of the best backup solution but there support sucks and they're attitude toward there paying customers is unprofessionnal and unaceptable. I have the impression that they don't care about us little customer... If they want to protect there software that is OK with me but not at my expand and not by treating me like a thief when I am an honest paying customer!

Best regards,
Atomas31

Atomas31

September 6th, 2007, 07:46 PM

-{ Quote: "

I can only test this, when I have an agreement with StorageCraft to reset my activation over and over again until all tests are finished. Besides that's not my job, StorageCraft can do these tests also. :)" }-

Good Luck Erik in having in agreement of that nature with StorageCraft:dry:

Best regards,
Atomas31

Atomas31

September 6th, 2007, 08:04 PM

-{ Quote: "
If the e-mail above is reproduced correctly that is really quite offensive: guilty by implication!
:ouch:" }-

Hi Longboard,

I can swear to you that this is the exact copy/paste of there first answer... And yes, it is quite offensive and frustrating and there second answer (that I finally receive and also copy/paste) is not better!!!

Longboard

September 6th, 2007, 08:27 PM

@E-A and Atomas

Ok I really want to be clear on this; there seems to be some overlap between your problems and some unique to each of you.

If SP is installed and activated in Primary and then Copy/update to several snaps and/or archives, there is no issue: Yes?

It is the reinstalling/reactivating or doing new activation per installation into each snapshot, reinstall of system that is the issue: Yes?

An image with either SP or other utility that might be used for restoring will have the activation retained: Yes?

What are the markers/scoring system to build machine UId?
How much configuration can be changed?
Certainly from what you are saying neither of you is changing HW.?

Atomas31

September 6th, 2007, 08:30 PM

@Longboard

If you install and activated your SP 3.0 on your primary snapshot and than create other snasphot from this one you shouldn't have any problem since that it was I have done with SP 2.0 (wich I buy before FD-ISR). I belieive that if you copy/update your primary snapshot to other snapshot there shouldn't be any problem either. The problem, I think, is simply when installing and activating SP 3.0 manually on each of your snapshots already created...

Peter2150

September 6th, 2007, 08:33 PM

Couple of things. First the copying of an email is really not permitted in the forum. it would be best if the poster removed it and maybe paraphrased. Otherwise I suspect on of the other mods will spot it an remove it.

2nd. I don't think there is any machine ID involved here. I think it is simply the number of activations.

I don't know if there is any easy solution other than, installing it in one snapshot, activating, and the doing a copy/update into the other snapshots. That should work. Pain in the butt.

The other thing as I think about it, is why does one really need SP3 in more than one snapshot. That will image the whole disk getting all the snapshot.

The reinstall problem has been solved with SP3, as uninstalling free's up the activation.

Pete

Acadia

September 6th, 2007, 08:47 PM

-{ Quote: "... why does one really need SP3 in more than one snapshot. " }-
Yeah, that one has me scratching my head also. ???

Acadia

ErikAlbert

September 6th, 2007, 09:05 PM

-{ Quote: "
What are the markers/scoring system to build machine UId?
How much configuration can be changed?
Certainly from what you are saying neither of you is changing HW.?" }-
The hardware doesn't count, the installation of SP counts and as long you do it only ONE time, maybe two, you won't have any activation problems.
Possible problems begin with the second installation of SP.

The reason why I think two is because Atomas has two activated SP's, the third one is not activated. When suddenly the activation didn't work anymore, Atomas probably repeated his activation several times like any other user would do and StorageCraft seems to record these repeated activations.
This guy at StorageCraft doesn't know anything about Atomas, he only reads these repeated activations and sends him an email.

StorageCraft doesn't have a problem with their activation method, USERS have a problem and who cares about users.

I thought that activations were created to protect the software against pirates, crack writers, bad guys, not for pestering honest users, who paid the bill.
Cracking SP is just another challenge for the crack writers, not a punishment. The good guys are punished for their honesty.

Peter2150

September 6th, 2007, 09:35 PM

Okay Everyone

I have to put my other hat on. This thread is on the brink of turning into a bash session, which isn't what the thread is about. Time has come to get back to the discussion of the program, and not activation bashing.

Pete

Longboard

September 7th, 2007, 12:28 AM

as per pete:-{ Quote: "I don't think there is any machine ID involved here. I think it is simply the number of activations.
I don't know if there is any easy solution other than, installing it in one snapshot, activating, and the doing a copy/update into the other snapshots. That should work. Pain in the butt.
The other thing as I think about it, is why does one really need SP3 in more than one snapshot. That will image the whole disk getting all the snapshot.
The reinstall problem has been solved with SP3, as uninstalling free's up the activation." }-
?storm in the proverbial?

Heh: peter: I would if/when I install this put it into my primary and by 'default' be copied as part of "core" to any other snap/arx.

If I could use CD boot to do all: then may approach in another way.

Any hoo: interesting thread so far guys: I'm getting the manual via second intention: ta ;)

Peter2150

September 7th, 2007, 12:41 AM

-{ Quote: "as per pete:
?storm in the proverbial?

Heh: peter: I would if/when I install this put it into my primary and by 'default' be copied as part of "core" to any other snap/arx.

If I could use CD boot to do all: then may approach in another way.

Any hoo: interesting thread so far guys: I'm getting the manual via second intention: ta ;)" }-

Yes you could do a copy to another snapshot, but I only do copies to archives.

Actually if you don't use the incremental feature, and you test restore there is a lot to doing it from the CD. What I've done is boot to the CD, and then image. Now you can chose to verify, but before the verify was there, I'd mount the image, and extract a file from the mounted image to the desktop. If that went well, then restore the image. Done.

I still test restore all images. With the continous incremental I've tested by picking a time in the middle and restoring to it. Works fine.

Defenestration

September 7th, 2007, 01:04 PM

How long should the boot CD environment take to load, because it's taking forever on my new machine (takes ages from when mouse cursor and background is displayed, to when Initializing... window is displayed, which then takes ages to display the "Do you want networking support ?", and currently "Loading frame...") ?

It's finally loaded, but has taken over 5 minutes from when the mouse cursor and background were first displayed.

My system is a P5B Deluxe mobo based system with 2 x 500GB WD hard disks RAID'ed together into 1 x 80GB volume and 1 x 920GB volume using onboard Intel RAID.

Defenestration

September 7th, 2007, 01:09 PM

Another thing, do the recovery environments already include include storage drivers for Intel onboard RAID ?

One other thing, can I modify the bootable CD so that the time zone automatically defaults to my time zone, instead of always having to manually change it within the environment ?

Defenestration

September 7th, 2007, 01:35 PM

The boot environment also "hangs" when I clicked on Backup. There was no hang when changing the time zone, but just about everything else seems to take a long time.

Just tried the boot CD on my 5 year old laptop and it had no problems, so there's something on my new machine that the boot environment doesn't like.

Defenestration

September 7th, 2007, 01:38 PM

I can't be sure yet, but it might have screwed with the system time on both my machines (laptop moved 1 hour forward and I didn't change time zone in boot environment, desktop moved 47 hours into the future when I set time zone to GMT with adjustment for daylight saving).

Defenestration

September 7th, 2007, 01:48 PM

-{ Quote: "I can't be sure yet, but it might have screwed with the system time on both my machines (laptop moved 1 hour forward and I didn't change time zone in boot environment, desktop moved 47 hours into the future when I set time zone to GMT with adjustment for daylight saving)." }-Confirmed on my laptop that just by booting into the Vista environment and exiting will move the system time forward by 1 hour.

Peter2150

September 7th, 2007, 02:30 PM

-{ Quote: "How long should the boot CD environment take to load, because it's taking forever on my new machine (takes ages from when mouse cursor and background is displayed, to when Initializing... window is displayed, which then takes ages to display the "Do you want networking support ?", and currently "Loading frame...") ?

It's finally loaded, but has taken over 5 minutes from when the mouse cursor and background were first displayed.

My system is a P5B Deluxe mobo based system with 2 x 500GB WD hard disks RAID'ed together into 1 x 80GB volume and 1 x 920GB volume using onboard Intel RAID." }-

That time does seem excessive. Especially at the end. I don't load the network stuff, and from that point on it's less then a minute.

Peter2150

September 7th, 2007, 02:34 PM

-{ Quote: "Another thing, do the recovery environments already include include storage drivers for Intel onboard RAID ?" }-

When you get booted into the program, click on Disk Map. If you see your Raid drives, the the storage drivers are there. If you don't see them, then no. If they aren't there you can load them. In Recommended you can do it after you are in the gui. In legacy, you have to use the F6 approach.

-{ Quote: "One other thing, can I modify the bootable CD so that the time zone automatically defaults to my time zone, instead of always having to manually change it within the environment ?" }-

Probably not. In the Legacy environment it doesn't matter as for as imaging and restoring goes.

Peter2150

September 7th, 2007, 02:35 PM

-{ Quote: "I can't be sure yet, but it might have screwed with the system time on both my machines (laptop moved 1 hour forward and I didn't change time zone in boot environment, desktop moved 47 hours into the future when I set time zone to GMT with adjustment for daylight saving)." }-

There is indeed a known issue with the time in VistaPe. It is a microsoft issue and not much storagecraft can go except work with Microsoft on it.

You just need to reset your clock after you reboot.

Brian K

September 7th, 2007, 04:01 PM

The recommended Recovery Environment is based on WinPE2 and the legacy is WinPE1 based. From the early BartPE days the time problem has existed but for me it varies from zero to 1 hour. With SP my clock is moved forward around 12 hours. I haven't looked closely as I expect the clock to be wrong and I correct the time when Windows has booted.

grnxnm

September 7th, 2007, 05:53 PM

-{ Quote: "The boot environment also "hangs" when I clicked on Backup. There was no hang when changing the time zone, but just about everything else seems to take a long time.

Just tried the boot CD on my 5 year old laptop and it had no problems, so there's something on my new machine that the boot environment doesn't like." }-

Try booting the Legacy environment rather than the Recommended environment. I can tell you for sure that the Legacy environment is better for nForce chipsets. Don't worry, the Legacy environment is by no means old - it's based on Windows Server 2003.

Defenestration

September 8th, 2007, 03:46 PM

I got the same hanging problem with the Legacy environment. I am going to do a bit of testing by getting rid of the RAID volumes, and just trying to install on a single hard disk to see if the problem is related to RAID.

I've also got a couple of other ideas.

BTW, the Asus P5B Deluxe uses the Intel P965 chipset.

Defenestration

September 8th, 2007, 05:23 PM

Right, I have tried several things but the problem still exists. :(

Let me give my setup and what I have tried:

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 OC'd to 3.24GHz
Asus P5B Deluxe WIFI (with WIFI module removed) with BIOS update 1216
2 x 1GB GEIL PC6400C4 ULL
2 x 500GB WD 5000AAKS HD's
nVidia 7600GT video card

All disabling was done within the BIOS and at each stage both the Recommended and Legacy environments wee tested:

1) I disabled RAID
2) I disabled the onboard JMicron SATA/PATA (ie. IDE) controller and booted from an external USB DVD drive.
3) I disabled everything else I could (eg. onboard sound controller, firewire controller, both LAN controllers)
4) Set CPU back to stock speed
5) Disabled USB and re-enabled JMicron SATA/PATA (ie. IDE) controller and booted from internal IDE DVD drive

I haven't tried disconnecting one of the hard disks yet, but will probably try that eventually.

Does anyone else have a similar system setup to me (particularly the Asus P5B Deluxe WIFI mobo and/or Intel Q6600 CPU) who is successfully using the SPD 3.0 boot environment without problems ?

Defenestration

September 8th, 2007, 05:26 PM

A Couple of suggestions for SPD:

1) Boot environment: Allow user to set display resolution + load/include proper display driver (maybe include MassStorage and Graphics Driver Packs www.driverpacks.net)
2) Windows: Re-write ImageManager without .NET.

Peter2150

September 8th, 2007, 06:19 PM

-{ Quote: "Right, I have tried several things but the problem still exists. :(

Let me give my setup and what I have tried:

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 OC'd to 3.24GHz
Asus P5B Deluxe WIFI (with WIFI module removed) with BIOS update 1216
2 x 1GB GEIL PC6400C4 ULL
2 x 500GB WD 5000AAKS HD's
nVidia 7600GT video card

All disabling was done within the BIOS and at each stage both the Recommended and Legacy environments wee tested:

1) I disabled RAID
2) I disabled the onboard JMicron SATA/PATA (ie. IDE) controller and booted from an external USB DVD drive.
3) I disabled everything else I could (eg. onboard sound controller, firewire controller, both LAN controllers)
4) Set CPU back to stock speed
5) Disabled USB and re-enabled JMicron SATA/PATA (ie. IDE) controller and booted from internal IDE DVD drive

I haven't tried disconnecting one of the hard disks yet, but will probably try that eventually.

Does anyone else have a similar system setup to me (particularly the Asus P5B Deluxe WIFI mobo and/or Intel Q6600 CPU) who is successfully using the SPD 3.0 boot environment without problems ?" }-

I have the x6800 cpu, but it's not on an Asus mobo. Also using Nvidia Raid 0 Not really similiar - but no problems.

grnxnm

September 8th, 2007, 10:38 PM

Strange, I have a very similar configuration on my primary dev machine and I don't experience those issues. Will test more.

My dev box:

Mobo based on Intel P965
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
4GB RAM
2xWD3200AAKS SATA in RAID 0
2xHitachi 200GB SATA in RAID 0
nVidia GeForce 8600GT w/ DDR3

I'll double check the Intel HBA drivers on the recovery environment CD. I know that there was some SATA polling going on in a previous version of this intel driver that would cause some systems to hang if they had other SATA devices with old firmware, and that it could be resolved by simply upgrading your firmware if for instance you had a SATA CD/DVD drive. As a workaround I believe intel disabled this legitimate feature within their miniport driver, to accomodate bad SATA firmware on some SATA devices. I'll check to see if our recovery environment is using the workaround-driver. In the mean time, please update the firmware on all of your SATA devices (if possible), particularly if you have a SATA CD/DVD drive. Firmware upgrades in this circumstance often resolve the issue.

Regarding your requests.

1) I'll bring up your suggestion to have the ability to load a desired display driver, but as the purpose of the recovery environment really isn't to look pretty I doubt this one will be a high priority, so don't hold your breath.

2) We will not rewrite ImageManager as a non-.NET app. Frankly it takes about 5 times longer to write an app with MFC/ATL/DCOM/etc vs. C# and .NET. We may wrap ImageManager.exe with Thinstall or Salamander such that its binary is completely independent of the .NET framework, to ease deployment. Would that help you?

Defenestration

September 9th, 2007, 12:20 PM

It does seem like the environment is waiting for something at each stage, and then eventually times out. I don't have any SATA CD/DVD drives, only an internal IDE DVD-RAM writer and an external USB DVD-RAM writer. Both hard disks are SATA, but they are pretty new.

How long does it take to boot the enivronment on your system, from the menu where you make the selection of Recommended or Legacy, to when the SPD GUI is displayed (ie. after all initialization) ?

Re. suggestions, thanks for at least considering them. Don't worry about wrapping up ImageManager, as it was more to do with the amount of memory it was using, rather than being reliant on .NET (I like the apps I use to be lean and mean :) ).

One more suggestion - the ability to configure the time zone the boot CD uses before it's burnt, so that it doesn't have to be manually set each time. Image For Windows allows you to do this and it's very useful as you may forget to change the timezone sometimes.

Peter2150

September 9th, 2007, 01:25 PM

-{ Quote: "

One more suggestion - the ability to configure the time zone the boot CD uses before it's burnt, so that it doesn't have to be manually set each time. Image For Windows allows you to do this and it's very useful as you may forget to change the timezone sometimes." }-

Not sure this really matters. Right on on the VistaPE (recommended) VistaPE screws up the time no matter what you do.

On the legacy (winpe) environment, I don't bother with the timezone settings. WHen I image or restore, all the times are correct.

Pete

grnxnm

September 9th, 2007, 01:40 PM

-{ Quote: "It does seem like the environment is waiting for something at each stage, and then eventually times out. I don't have any SATA CD/DVD drives, only an internal IDE DVD-RAM writer and an external USB DVD-RAM writer. Both hard disks are SATA, but they are pretty new." }-

Hmm. Okay. I still suspect the intel storage matrix miniport driver. The symptoms match. I'll dig into this and keep you posted.

-{ Quote: "
How long does it take to boot the enivronment on your system, from the menu where you make the selection of Recommended or Legacy, to when the SPD GUI is displayed (ie. after all initialization) ?" }-

I'm at home right now so I don't have physical access to my dev box to test exact boot times of the recovery environment. It takes a couple of minutes.

-{ Quote: "
Re. suggestions, thanks for at least considering them. Don't worry about wrapping up ImageManager, as it was more to do with the amount of memory it was using, rather than being reliant on .NET (I like the apps I use to be lean and mean :) )." }-

As to memory utilization, it helps to know that .NET apps will suck up a lot of memory before they even do any real work, but they also yield (return) that memory back to other processes if those other processes need it. My initial reaction was the same as yours until I learned this, and indeed observed it. That really is better than simply having unused memory, doing nothing for you.

-{ Quote: "
One more suggestion - the ability to configure the time zone the boot CD uses before it's burnt, so that it doesn't have to be manually set each time. Image For Windows allows you to do this and it's very useful as you may forget to change the timezone sometimes." }-

Thanks for the suggestion.

Peter2150

September 9th, 2007, 04:52 PM

-{ Quote: "

How long does it take to boot the enivronment on your system, from the menu where you make the selection of Recommended or Legacy, to when the SPD GUI is displayed (ie. after all initialization) ?

" }-

Just timed it. Booted into Legacy. Once I chose legacy, it was 3min 3sec until the Network adapter question popped up. I chose no. Another 7 seconds to gui

ErikAlbert

September 9th, 2007, 06:22 PM

-{ Quote: "Just timed it. Booted into Legacy. Once I chose legacy, it was 3min 3sec until the Network adapter question popped up. I chose no. Another 7 seconds to gui" }-
That makes 3m10s, not much difference with SP2, which has a loading time of 3m30s on my computer and your computer is probably faster. I thought the loading time of SP3 was reduced with 50%.

Defenestration

September 9th, 2007, 06:40 PM

While 3 minutes is still a lot longer than what I'm used to with IFD/IFL boot disks, mine is taking at least 10 minutes, and then there are delays/hangs when performing operations within the boot environment (eg. clicking on Backup).

-{ Quote: "Hmm. Okay. I still suspect the intel storage matrix miniport driver. The symptoms match. I'll dig into this and keep you posted." }-Can this still play a factor when the disks are not configured as RAID (in both BIOS and Intel Matrix storage manager) ?

Peter2150

September 9th, 2007, 08:27 PM

-{ Quote: "That makes 3m10s, not much difference with SP2, which has a loading time of 3m30s on my computer and your computer is probably faster. I thought the loading time of SP3 was reduced with 50%." }-

It is if you use the "recommended" vistaPe. Thanks to micosoft choice of nvidia drivers, I have to use the Legacy which is the same as v2.5

grnxnm

September 9th, 2007, 08:42 PM

-{ Quote: "While 3 minutes is still a lot longer than what I'm used to with IFD/IFL boot disks, mine is taking at least 10 minutes, and then there are delays/hangs when performing operations within the boot environment (eg. clicking on Backup).

Can this still play a factor when the disks are not configured as RAID (in both BIOS and Intel Matrix storage manager) ?" }-

Yes, absolutely.

grnxnm

September 14th, 2007, 12:45 PM

FYI - WinPE can experience slow boot times if you have floppy disk drive(s) enabled in your BIOS setup without actually having physical floppy disk drive(s) connected to your machine.

If this applies to you, simply enter your BIOS setup and disable all floppy drives.

Peter2150

September 14th, 2007, 01:44 PM

-{ Quote: "FYI - WinPE can experience slow boot times if you have floppy disk drive(s) enabled in your BIOS setup without actually having physical floppy disk drive(s) connected to your machine.

If this applies to you, simply enter your BIOS setup and disable all floppy drives." }-

Does that just disable them from booting, or does it totally disable them.

grnxnm

September 14th, 2007, 05:00 PM

It makes the WinPE boot itself and all operations within WinPE very very slow.

silver0066

September 15th, 2007, 10:37 AM

-{ Quote: "Does that just disable them from booting, or does it totally disable them." }-Pete,

It totally disables them.

Silver

ErikAlbert

September 15th, 2007, 12:03 PM

I did some testing, to check if the boot sequence makes a difference in the loading time of the SP recovery CD.
To avoid any confusing regarding the loading time : my loading time begins, when I click on the option "1. Start StorageCraft Recovery Environment (Standard Drivers)" and ends when I see the main menu of "ShadowProtect Desktop v2.0".

1. First I changed the boot sequence in BIOS (CDROM, HARDDISK, FLOPPY) and even disabled the floppy disk with "Device Manager".

Loading time = 2m52s.

2. Then I kept the boot sequence in BIOS and enabled the floppy disk with "Device Manager"

Loading time = 2m52s.

3. Then I changed the boot sequence in BIOS (FLOPPY, CDROM, HARDDISK) and kept the floppy disk enabled. In other words back to my first configuration.

Loading time = 2m52s.

That surprised me a little, because the very first time (long ago), the loading time was 3m30s. I have no explanation for this improvement of 38 seconds and I didn't change anything in my hardware or drivers.
It could be my mistake, but my habit is to avoid such mistakes and certainly not a mistake of 38 seconds.

One thing is certain : changing the boot sequence and/or disabling the floppy drive didn't make any difference on MY computer and that was the main goal of my test. :)

Peter2150

September 15th, 2007, 12:22 PM

-{ Quote: "Pete,

It totally disables them.

Silver" }-

Thanks Silver. THis is one of those things I my gut, and Erik's test tells me the gain isn't worth the potential gain.

Defenestration

September 15th, 2007, 12:29 PM

-{ Quote: "FYI - WinPE can experience slow boot times if you have floppy disk drive(s) enabled in your BIOS setup without actually having physical floppy disk drive(s) connected to your machine." }-That was indeed the problem as I don't have a floppy drive!

After disabling, the hanging problem disappeared although the first time I booted the SPD environment (the Vista one) there was no mouse cursor visible. However, this has only happened once.

Many thanks for not forgetting about this problem grnxnm, and for coming up with the solution!

I was beginning to lose faith in SPD, but I can now test it thoroughly.

The clock being moved forward is most annoying though. I hope this can be fixed soon (whether by MS or SC).