Drive Cloner Version 6 Delayed; New Beta Being Rolled Out

Yes you're right, it's not always Windows Updates. This is why we still ask people to send in log files, we check log files to see how each computer is because each computer is different and sometimes it's hard to see. I'm not Tech Support, but I am starting to understand what you say Froggie regarding good ways to install a good back up strategy. I think it's time I share what I do. You can rip it to shreds or be nice to me, I can handle it

On my computer at home I have a 250 GB SSD and a 2 TB Hard Drive, I have my OS installed on my SSD, and all my data installed on my 2 TB HDD. The reason why, if anything ever attacks say Windows, then my OS is compromised, or RollBack Rx is compromised, data is still ok as it's on that seperate hard drive. Even before I had the two, I had a 1TB and I split it into two partitions. When you have this set up, you don't need the Scavenger Tool, you don't need Drive Cloner (although imaging software makes things easier). Because your data is nowhere near the affected area. People on here are constantly telling me about how they lose their data, well I honestly don't know how your computer is set up. If I did, I could probably tell you how and why you lost your data.

Overclocker was in the position he's in because he didn't verify what an update would do to RollBack Rx. It's a shame, but even if he had the set up I had, he wouldn't be having this problem to begin with.

In fact...this might make for a Knowledgebase article. Hmm....

People want me to say there's problems with RollBack Rx. Well, if you can find me a perfect set up (and I don't mean mine ) that will never have any issues with RollBack Rx guaranteed, I'd have to give you something, like a product key. The reality is, people play with settings, have custom configs, and there's nobody in this world that will ever be able to compensate for every configuration.

In fact, let's put out a challenge. If you can prove to me you partitioned your OS seperate from your data, I'll reward you. With what? I don't know, I'll figure that out on Monday.

Until then...

~ Removed Copyrighted Image URL ~

 

Hi Kurtis,

For years I've been advocating separating the OS from your data. Two partitions. No reward requested.

 

Again its the users fault. He should have had his system set up like yours, he should have known to check with HDS before installing an MS update. He did not, so its his fault. RIGHT!!!!!

I might agree with you if HDS clearly warned the user and all prospective users, that these measures (or at least some measures) need to be taken in order to properly protect their system and data when using Rx. Then, if the end user went ahead and did not follow HDSs advice, I would agree that it was the users fault. But HDS NEVER advises users of this,,,,,,well in some cases they do,,,,,like after the user has his system and data hosed, You just did exactly that, advise Overclocker after the fact.

You acknowledge these things here on Wilders but really, for many/most of us here its not news. You pointing out what is obvious to us does nothing to resolve the problem or to do anything to reverse our mistrust of Rx and HDS.

 

Well... I've gotten pretty winded recently chatting about RBrx so I'm probably gonna stop soon... unless there's something I really feel a need to respond to.

As far as how great your system is and how well it's setup... good for you. But Kurtis, the typical user out here on the street goes into Best Buy and buys an OEM machine that comes with one big disk and usually ONE BIG PARTITION... the SYSTEM partition. And MicroSloth makes it real easy to understand by putting everything the user needs on that ONE BIG PARTITION under his registered name. And all those great music/video/whatever tools do such a great job by putting the appropriate files in their appropriate DEFAULT areas on that ONE BIG PARTITION. So now the user has everything on that ONE BIG PARTITION.

One day their perusing the web and they come across a Rollback RX ad that tells them how it will protect their machine from "almost" any type of failure (without telling them what it won't protect) on that ONE BIG PARTITION. That doesn't really grab 'em yet, but then they read about RansomeWare on the HDS site and how they're totally protected against it. "Yea, this is something I really need... I can't afford to lose my files!" So they get it and install it on their ONE BIG PARTITION... and now they're happy and feel totally protected.

Two years later they BOOT their system up in the morning, it BSODs then BOOTs into the repair facility, runs ChkDsk and destroys their machine... every file placed on that machine over the last 2-yrs is gone. This is NOT a unique happening... but it is the TYPICAL USER out there, I know, I've dealt with tons of them.

We on these forums are NOT typical users... we actually learn from other people's mistakes (at least I would like to think so), but that user above is. I've probably used over 200 different applications on my Windows systems over the years... and not one single one of them (except Windows itself and Rollback RX) has ever destroyed my Windows systems. Sure, I tweak, I play, I do lots of dangerous things to my system (even make it a honeypot upon occasion when chasing infection vectors for certain nasties), but still, no app has ever destroyed my system 'cept you-know-what. To be honest, statistically, that looks pretty bad.

Believe me I want RBrx to work well (as a big snashot user I do like its speed)... but I don't think it can ever be even close to the panacea that we expect (and HDS tells us it is) with the technology it currently uses. Hiding things from Windows (and its users) is just not a good approach when it comes to recovery.

OK, I'm tired and I'm done ... see ya in the morning!

 

Froggie, I assume you avoided the great malwarebytes destruction of users windows systems a few years ago....Delete system files!

 

C1, I'm not sure what you're referring to... I've been a MBAM user almost since its beginning and haven't seen anything like that. Maybe I was just lucky.

I'll give it to you, though... one app did it once. Wish I could say that about you-know-what

 

AaaaaHAH! See up there ^^^^^^^^! That's one of those ONE BIG PARTITION users!!! BUT... Pete is NOT a Typical User as referenced in my above post. That's his BUSINESS system and as such he knows it must be protected. So he did his due diligence and discovered the most effective ways for him to provide for that system's protection, knowing that his DATA is of supreme importance. As a result, he has ONE BIG Fully Protected PARTITION and comfort in knowing he won't lose any amount of very important data.

Typical users usually don't do that type of due diligence when it comes to their systems... heck, I'm not really sure they know anything about how important their DATA will eventually become and that it even needs to be protected. They just bought a personal computer like their friend's and think it will do most anything FOR them. What they don't understand... YET is what that computer may do TO them (or that they may do to themselves).

If OEM computer manufacturers would concentrate on selling fully protected systems that operated in an AUTOMATIC way rather than fully BLOATED systems that convolute even the best machines with SHAREware, TRIALware, BLOATware and tons of other basically useless pre-installed tasks, I think that would be a great first step in making this PC world we operate in a bit safer. Don't you think it would be pretty easy for an OEM manufacturer to enter into a license agreement for say 3-million pre-installed licenses of a solid, reliable imaging product (place your favorite imaging application here) which would automatically do the imaging and maintain image limits and disk space utilization limits on that 2nd, smaller, physically separated storage device also included in that OEM PC? The added cost...?? Maybe $6-8 for the imaging app and appx. $25 for the separate storage device. Do you think asking the buyer for that extra $33 (at cost) for this type of system would be too much to ask, with the buyer knowing they are completely protected against "most" system failures? Sounds like pretty cheap insurance to me.

Of course this solution doesn't address every possible failure scenario (fire, earthquake, very mad spouse)... but it sure addresses almost the entire 100% of all the failures we hear about on these forums (and forum members are somewhat knowledgeable) and my guess, would address almost the same % of failures possibly encountered by those TYPICAL USERs I referred to above.

Personally, I do not build systems for people unless asked specifically for help in doing so... especially if I'm receiving any sort of remuneration for that effort. If I did receive a fee, every single system I have ever built for profit (appx. 30 over the years including from scratch and OEM purchased/modified) has included the cost of the above approach... and not one single one of them, when wrecked for whatever reason, has ever not been able to recover from that sort of disaster. The only contact I've ever received concerning a failure was a request for help in the restoration of that system which was never a problem. The request came as a result of the user who never really had to restore it before and maybe not quite understanding the available documentation. In my experience... the above approach works and works very well.

...and of course, NONE of this has much to do with the upcoming BETA test of Drive Cloner v6... sorry Kurtis , too much coffee this morning.

 

You have got to be kidding! Have you read the hundreds of messages on Wilder's regarding disasters caused by Rbx going back several years to version 9?

 

This customer emailed us in January asking about which updates he should be weary of, we put which ones in the body of his email, and linked to the forum thread. He deleted the email thinking it was spam, and then assumed we never got back to him.

I can tolerate a bias, but not knowing the full facts is a different story. This customer is well aware, he had the resources available, and lost them. He never followed up with us, and went ahead and compromised his own computer. Luckily we were able to get back to him and recover a fair sized amount of his snapshots (incl. the most important ones.)

I think protection is sort of like a good pair of jeans, it's something each user is going to have a different fit for. I mean, you have my method, your method, and large scale companies who utilize SCCM. Everyone has a different approach I find.

 

Hey guys,

Quick Update on the Drive Cloner Version 6 beta. Things are going well, and we're getting a lot of great feedback that our development team is taking into account.

We have room for two more beta testers! For participating, you'll get a license for Drive Cloner's full version complete with support. If you already have Drive Cloner, alternate arrangements can be made.

These spots will fill up fast. PM me on here, or email me at my email address below and we'll make the arrangements.

Cheers,

 

Hmm, seems a whole thread of customers on here that had their entire systems destroyed by mbam has "vanished"....1000's of computers where rendered useless...Are you sure you haven't "forgotten" the scandal?....Still even if its no longer history at Wilders it isn't so on the www...

http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/malwarebytes-update-deletes-legitimate-system-files.html

 

Thanks for your responses, we have filled up the two spots for beta testers! I'll update this thread if we have further openings.

 

So wouldn't a RollBack user simply roll back to an earlier snapshot?

I suppose that they couldn't because they couldn't boot into Windows at all and RollBack didn't have a boot time manager to select a different, earlier snapshot and the users didn't have Drive Clone because they didn't know that they need it for such a circumstance (if it even existed and worked at that time).

And the same thing could happen right now....?

 

Actually, Rollback RX does have that BOOT time capability and it would have gotten the user out of trouble easily... until the next Malwarebytes update anyway...

 

The short answer. Because shadowprotect works inside windows. Rbrx works outside and below windows.

Rbrx has to see and process each and every bit of disk access. Changes outside will mess things up. It'd be like the author of a book coming over to your house unobserved and editing his novel on your bookshelf - while you are sleeping. The story isn't going flow right the next day.

All one needs to know is you need cold sbs imaging. Anything different is crapshoot.

 

Sector-by-sector just takes longer Pete, and I've already used it with Reflect using the cold restore from a USB stick, so I know it works on my system, W7-Pro 64bit.
J
Edit:
sbs took 40 minutes to create an image, intelligent copy took 17 minutes

sbs took 50 minutes to restore, RDR took 6 minutes.

all the above using Verify - Yes

size of C = 68.98GB on a 256GB SSD

 

SBS may sound intimidating and scary. It's just a thorough copy that grabs every sector, used or not.

If anyone should scared of anything it's the additional layer of the RBRX driver and kernel. A natural thing when you add a complex layer under an already complex system (NTFS). It is more important than ever that your system has stable i/o hardware and disk access. The RBRX kernel seems pretty stable to me though.

TRIVIA:
But that's nothing compared to what the drives do to the data when they slam it down onto the platter. HDD experts will tell you the signal put down on the disk surface is analog. Look up PRML and all the error checking codes that go with it. That's for spinners. For a 50-year old technology.

For Solids, it gets even worse. They deal with voltage levels represented by a few tens of electrons. That isn't a whole lot. Fully 46% or greater of the data returned from a NAND cell has serious errors from the get go. All your data has to go through extensive error correction. Not detection, but on the fly correction. Much much more than on a Spinner disk!

SSD have their own look-up table roughly similar to RBRX. Your text file goes in on sectors 5000-7000 for example. And throughout the life of the SSD that text file may get moved among different blocks. But windows and windows' $MFT catalog always think its 5000-7000. The SSD does its sleight of hand magic, perhaps fragmenting a file into thousands of pieces scattered all over each chip and it has to keep track of each piece. And don't forget garbage collection and TRIM. But it always reports 5000-7000 unless windows say to move it.

In fact, there's no such thing as sectors or clusters or blocks in the storage chips. That's all an arbitrary thing the controller invents for the benefit of modern file systems.

The SSD has to keep track of errors, provide space for error correction bits, wear leveling, fragmenting, where each file actually is, where windows thinks it is at. And it has to have spare blocks to swap in when some lose their electrons due to leakage. Not only that, each NAND chip has thousands of bad cells to begin with - so add in a factory defect map.

And the NAND chip logic also takes account of electrons jumping from one cell to the next. It be like putting 2 glasses next to each other, fill one up, it spills over into the next one, and eventually that one fills up. So you expect that and dump some out, keeping one filled, and the other empty like it was before. All factored in and examined on the fly.

Eventually a lot of this complexity will go away and the OS file system will control the storage operations directly on the chips themselves.

 

Also a friendly reminder that you guys can always post questions on our forums, where both myself and the rest of the HDS staff can help answer your questions.

 

Well, I started a THREAD on April 4th in the HDS Drive Cloner area about an issue I thought was pretty serious. It was discovered during the BETA testing process by our resident imaging expert, Brian_K, where he bombed his system during some simple testing, but is fully applicable to Drive Cloner RX v5. To date there have been no responses of any kind from either HDS or users of DCrxV5.

I guess the obvious TWO questions are... 1) Is anybody from HDS even viewing those Forums, and 2) Is anyone even using Drive Cloner? My intuitive guess after 3-weeks is... NOPE.

 

Hi Froggie,

I'll have someone look at this issue. It could be that maybe someone thought to get a response and simply got side tracked; but I'll take a look into it personally.

 

Thanks, Kurtis! Maybe it's just my personal view of the issue that makes it seem so serious, but Brian's experience proved that users may get easily clobbered by this issue. He wound up restoring his image to his DATA partition rather than his SYSTEM partition which wiped out all his data

Luckily he had that partition backed up as well...

 

That's good he had a backup! Yeah I'll show that thread around today and hopefully we'll get a response ASAP