Alternative to True Image (nervous nellie)

What's going on with you? First you say ... "To say so and so software is good and degrade any other is simply ignorance." ... and that was absolutely fine. Now, you seem bent on demonstrating your own ignorance by your apparent crusade in favour of ATI. Talk about wanting to have it both ways.

There is no such thing. You, however, appear to equate "software which has never failed" with "software which you - twhk000 - have never been failed by". The two are quite different. While we're on the subject, though, I can truthfully claim that Drive Snapshot (DS) has never failed me, my company, nor the various clients of ours we have implemented DS-based backup strategies for - and that includes both image backups and full (and partial) restores, in both workstation and server/client environments.

Of course, other people may well be able to claim the same about the imaging software they use.

So, get off your bandwagon, and start acting according to your own opening words.

 

Hohohoho...my sides are about to split. That's just plain nonsense.

As for your request, there is NO software that has NEVER failed and NO ONE that can tell you otherwise.

I CAN tell you, however, that ATI 8 and every build of ATI 9 HAS failed on my system in one way or another while IFD has NEVER failed on my system. Both of these claims are based on actual system restore statistics. FD-ISR has never failed on my system either.

I haven't met or read of any one in all of Wilders that is qualified to tell you how robust ATI and IFD are, in terms of failing on a given person's system across the entire user population, with any statistically significant degree of certainty.

The rest is either strictly "on my system", unwarranted general inferences, or sheer speculation.

 

Read what i have mentioned .......consistency and reliability....both in imaging and restoring.........

Read the post completely and dont intrepret the statements out of context... Dont put words in others mouth please...


Google it to find out how many forum members are happy with ATI than with other imaging software... I m not claiming ATI to be goof proof or never failing but it is more consistent and has a greater degree of reliability in order to disagree with me please test by yourself and figure it out...if i have to show you the actual reasons why ATI is far better it will be a white paper for which i wil never be paid by ATI ...lol....

Spm.... imaging softwares dont alone has to provide the facility of imaging or restoring apart from that there are other issues which has to be given consideration... ... Its ridiculous to use different softwares for different purposes it will invariable crash your windows and never allow you the luxury of using your computer at your leisure.... the bottom line is how far consumers (we the general folks) are getting benefitted...my only suggestion to you is look at the bigger picture.....


**there are other posts go through them as well to know why ATI stands out.....

Knight

 

Thanks for bringing this issue to out.....


Would you please define the failure...as to what happened? why did that happened? what did you do ? and what is the error you got? and how did you resolve?


Knight

 

Er, I can see that English is not your native language, but what you have written there hasn't the slightest meaning at all. Would you care to try and explain what it is you're attempting to say?

What a load of claptrap. I repeat ... go back to your opening words in this thread (those about 'ignorance'). You are demonstrating more of that self-defining commodity than everyone else put together.

 

Evaluate the software and provide your own insights rather than evaluating the forum members....lol.....


By the way...english is not my native language...did i ever proclaimed that it is my native language...lol...

Simple words for an elderly man like you is that ...Oh you who wants to headbutt and destroy the mountain (TWHK), Have mercy on your head not on the mountain..


I just went through your posts and i figured out that you read manuals of softwares and build your logic and develop your knowledge base on that..... dont you think you are missing the boat my freind.....

I suggested to you with my so called poor english to test ATI and crash it and report to us ... can you do that

After that we will have acronis techs to answer you say

 

Please notice the title of this thread is "ALTERNATIVE to True Image." twhk000's posts are limited to discussions of ATI, somewhat fan-boy in nature, off-thread, and rather personal in their insults of other posters.

If you want to preach about ATI, please start your own thread and do not hi-jack this one!

 

I think some users here are too emotional about the software they use/ like or trust.

 

This issue has been going on for two or three years now and it's not me bringing it out, it's many people and MANY builds and a general instability to ATI, especially version 9. The current build works OK for me, but I haven't had the nerve to try a restore yet, which is the definitive test that everything works OK for backup/restore purposes.

As to your other questions, that a lot of questions requiring alot of complex answers. Besides, that information in my particular case is of little value to others - it's only my system.

You'll be much better served by doing more extensive reading here and in the ATI forum to get a possibly more representative sampling of those who have problems and post about them.

When a software program that should be flawless for data security has a history like ATI does, MY particular solution was to put it away and go buy another software. That's exactly what I did and that's why I am a user of both IFD/BING and of Retrospect Pro, in addition to ATI. I use Retrospect Pro because it's the best solution to manage and regularly back up my families 4 desktops and 2 laptops over my home LAN.

I've had FD-ISR longer than all of them but that is for system recovery, not for backup. As you can probably guess, I no longer believe in putting all my eggs in one basket where backup is concerned (among many other things).

 

OK, in summary .. you don't have a clue. The more you go on with this nonsense, the more you will be laughed at. Do yourself a favour, and leave.

 

Now we've gone a little too far ladies and gentlemen. I'm not going to remove anything at this time; but as has been stated by another poster please keep in the mind the topic of the thread. Indeed; this thread is for discussion of alternatives to ATI - not ATI itself.

Secondly, I think anyone here can stand back and realize that there have been personal remarks made in this thread which benefit nobody whatsoever. Let us have civilized and polite discussion or none at all.

 

Both the Trial and Eval versions of ShadowProtect are fully functional versions of the product (all features are functional). The Trial version expires after a month and cannot be activated. The Eval version expires after a month, but it can be activated after which it will not expire.

 

A month is the minimum for image backup softwares and immediate system recovery softwares. 15 days is too short, if you have to test these softwares in your freetime.
I had to test both separately first and then the combination of both.

Regarding the activation, I hate it. Period.

 

True, activation is a hastle, but it helps prevent software piracy, and StorageCraft lost a lot of revenue due to piracy of ShadowUser. A lesson learned.

 

I agree Howard, mounting images is quite useful when you wish to get access to a particular file that was on your drive at the time that the backup was created. It's silly to do a full volume restore of an image file just so that you can get at a single file within the backup image. Additionally, you can do data analysis against mounted images, as well as virus scans and chkdsk. In fact, if the mounter allows you to mount the image as a writeable volume, and allows you to save your changes, then you can scan your images for viruses/etc and save the repairs and restore your new clean incremental. If the mounter is sufficiently powerful, you can mount many images side-by-side, concurrently (preferably to mount points rather than drive letters) for versioning analysis.

 

I see I should have read more before my previous post... You're spot on.

 

Now THAT makes us speechless...

 

Hi Pete. The Trial version of ShadowProtect is fully functional. The only difference between the Trial and the Eval version is that the Trial expires after 30 days and cannot be activated, whereas the Eval expires after 30 days and can be activated. You shouldn't have any trouble checking out the product's features with the Trail version, although as someone else mentioned this will mean that you won't have access to the recovery environment. It's understandable that the recovery environment isn't handed out for free as it's based on components licensed from Microsoft and so a royalty must be paid for each copy of the recovery environment that is distributed.

 

There are other ways to prevent privacy and I've seen it working on my own computer. Activation is just a lazy way to do it and users are the victims of this poor method.

 

In the Windows world, your best bet (IMHO) at gaining access to your RAID drive(s) from the recovery environment is to use a recovery environment which has the greatest device coverage, hence one which is based on Windows itself. Both ShadowProtect and Ghost/LiveState ship with recovery environments (bootable CDs) which are based on Windows. When you boot the recovery CD of these products, you will have the option to press F6 and feed in your miniport diskette. Often though you'll find that, for the more common host bus adapters, the miniport device driver for your adapter is already included on the recovery CD and is automatically loaded when the CD boots. If you intend to use your backup product for quick disaster recovery (to quickly recovery your system boot volume), then it is critical that you first ensure that the recovery environment of your chosen product is capable of accessing both the drives/media/network resources on which your backup images are stored as well as the drive(s) to which you will be restoring images. Acronis True Image has a recovery environment which is based on Linux, and this can cause problems when you attempt to access certain devices. Windows-based recovery environments are better, and hence the easiest solution for this issue is ShadowProtect or Ghost/LiveState. For enterprise (corporate) customers there are additional incentives for using a Windows-based recovery CD. For instance, Windows automatically supports Dynamic Volumes. Trusting that some non-Windows recovery environment properly supports dynamic volumes, especially as the structures that define them (licensed from Veritas to Microsoft) are all proprietary and undisclosed, is a stretch.

 

As I understand it, the activation in the latest version of ShadowProtect is simply a matter of entering your product key and clicking on an Activate/Register button. As long as you have an internet connection the process is essentially automated. I don't know of many commercial products that don't require you to enter at least some type of key upon installation, do you?

 

That's a very good point. Greatest functionality is usually the goal (WinPE is better than Linux for recovery environments). However it has the drawback that WinPE just can't be handed out for free... so from a marketing/sales/evaluation perspective Linux-based recovery environments are appealing, even though in the end you'd probably prefer to have a WinPE based recovery environment. Hmm... not sure how that one can be resolved. I suppose you could build a BartPE recovery disc and add to it the product binaries for the restore software of your choice.

 

It's fairly important to determine your exact needs before selecting a backup solution. Home users who don't care about disaster recovery have many free backup options. Technical home users can cobble together enough free stuff to make a passable backup/disaster-recovery solution. Enterprises, generally, need to be far more cautious about the software they place on their servers, and should carefully evaluate the software for stability (does it deadlock your system? do its services hang or crash? do its device drivers cause blue screens or do they have any interop issues with other drivers?), data integrity (are the back up image files good even after thousands of incrementals and splits? does it corrupt original data?) performance (does it use a lot of memory, leak memory, hog CPU or interrupt any applications?), security (does it protect your data? How are its APIs guarded?), and maintenance (is it automated, scriptable, can it be controlled remotely, can one console GUI control an entire enterprise, etc). If you are an enterprise customer, or a very discriminating customer, it would be advisable to ask the backup solution vendor these pointed questions and do your own due diligence as well.

A side note: If you are evaluating criteria like the above, in relation to memory leaking you will find that the Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) on Windows XP has some bugs that will cause VSS requestor processes (VSS-aware backup applications) to leak memory on each snap/unsnap cycle. Also, on XP, on each snap/unsnap cycle the vssvc.exe service as well as a dllhost.exe process will leak a little memory. This is usually only an issue if you use a VSS-compliant backup application to automatically backup your data on regular intervals over a long period of time. These same leaks used to also occur on Windows Server 2003 however they have been fixed in a recent private (you must request it, KB923628, directly from MS support) hotfix for Windows Server 2003 only.

If you are an enterprise or extremely-discriminating user, the following may prove useful.

First let me warn you that I'm a bit biased on this topic (I'm an engineer who has worked on core components for a couple of the mainstream backup/disaster-recovery products out there, from competing companies). Also, my experience on this topic is limited to the Windows platforms.

I would recommend that you consider backup solutions that enable you to quickly recovery individual files, as well as to quickly recover from a full system meltdown (ie. a hard disk crash). In my mind there are currently only three products which can do this with any degree of reliability. They are (in no particular order):

1) Symantec's Ghost (for Desktops) and LiveState Recovery (for Servers)
2) StorageCraft's ShadowProtect
3) Acronis' True Image

These three products share several similar traits. They all create backup images files which represent the entire state of a logical volume's data, rather than backing up individual files themselves. This enables you to perform full volume restoration should a disaster occur, such as a hard drive failure. They also enable you to easily restore individual files by allowing you to mount/browse into the contents of a backup image file. They allow you to backup your volumes in a hot/in-use state, so you do not need to stop any of your work or close any of your applications when the backup is performed. They allow you to set up a backup schedule so that the backups are automated and no user intervention is required to ensure that backups are occurring. They allow you to perform "incremental backups" which means that when a backup occurs, it will only backup the changes which occurred since the previous backup. They all provide a bootable "recovery environment" CD which contains a bootable OS as well as tools that can be used to restore/recovery files and/or full volumes in the event that you are restoring to a machine which doesn't contain an OS, or if you are restoring an image file over your existing OS. They are all "enterprise ready" as they allow you to remotely manage large networks from one GUI console, contain scripting support, and are integrated with platform technologies (such as Microsoft's Volume Shadow Copy Service - more detail below).

I'll discuss how these products differ in their offerings of these features.

Hot Backups: This is probably the most important aspect of these products because this feature allows you to backup your machine with zero down time. You don't (at least you shouldn't - keep on reading) need to stop any of your applications in order to capture a good clean backup. This feature is made possible by a sophisticated "snapshot" device driver which can instantly capture the state of a logical volume at a specified time and expose this captured state to the backup software. Although Windows XP and 2003 ship with a built-in snapshot device driver (volsnap.sys), it is somewhat lacking in features (especially on XP) and alltogether absent on Windows 2000. Therefore all of these products give preference to a proprietary snapshot device driver. The snapshot device driver used in Symantec's products is licensed to Symantec from StorageCraft (see the copyright file properties of pqv2i.sys or symsnap.sys). StorageCraft of course uses its own snapshot device driver (albeit a newer and better version) in ShadowProtect. Acronis also has its own snapshot device driver. There is a significant difference between the StorageCraft snapshot device driver and the Acronis device driver which results in a substantial difference in performance when incremental backups are created. StorageCraft's snapshot device driver is far more efficient and fast. This can be easily reproduce by creating a backup job and performing changes to many files after the first full backup and before an incremental backup. In this sense, Acronis is more of a desktop product as it simply consumes too much CPU and I/O bandwidth when taking incrementals which is less desireable on servers.

Scheduled Backups: The schedulers for these three products are very similar. One of the main differences is how frequently they allow you to backup your drives. Symantec's products allow you to backup a volume once every hour. StorageCraft's produt allows you to schedule a backup to occur once every 15 minutes, however the schedule can be modified so that the backup will occur once every minute (which is possible because of StorageCraft's highly-optimized incremental imaging technology). Acronis' products allow you to schedule backups to occur on a volume once per day. Symantec and Acronis allow you to backup to CD or DVD. StorageCraft's solution does not currently support backup directly to optical media. Acronis users report many issues when they backup to optical media if the backup requires more than one disk (so called "spanned images"). Symantec's backup to optical media appears to be solid.

Platform Integration (VSS): Microsoft provides a framework called the "Volume Shadow Copy Service" (VSS) to assist in the creation of clean backups. This service can be used by backup products (called "VSS Requestors"), as well as by applications (called "VSS writers), which create data (such as Exchange, SQL Server, etc). When a backup product requests a backup, it can tell VSS to "quiesce" these VSS-aware applications. This will cause these applications to perform a quick flush of their critical data, without interrupting anything, so that the snapshot device driver will capture their data in its optimal state. Interacting properly with VSS is critical to performing a good quality backup and if you are an enterprise customer you really need to give this particular issue some weight. Symantec's online knowledge base indicates that you must take down your Exchange server in order to successfully backup its data. StorageCraft and Acronis allow you to backup your Exchange server without taking it down. VSS-aware snapshot device drivers which provide snapshots of volumes to backup software are called "VSS Software Providers" and of the three products only StorageCraft's snapshot device driver is a true VSS Software Provider. Neither Symantec's nor Acronis' device driver is a VSS software provider. You can verify this by installing these three products and then typing the command: C:\> vssadmin list providers You will see Microsoft's system provider "volsnap" as well as StorageCraft's VSS software provider.

File Recovery (Mounting/Browsing Image File Contents): When a backup is taken, an "image file" is created, which contains the data necessary to represent the contents of a volume at a given time. An incremental image file is dependent upon the data in the previous incremental image file, and this dependency chain run all the way back to the first full/base image file created for a particular volume. This first (full/base) image file usually contains all in-use sectors so it is generally very large. All of these products allow you to compress and/or encrypt these image files. In order to allow users to restore individual files from a backup image, all of these products allow you to "mount" your backup images as virtual drives. Symantec's products also ship with a secondary "image file browser" application which allows for browsing without mounting. There are subtle differences in the mounters. All of these mounters allow you to make changes to the mounted image, but only the StorageCraft and Acronis mounters allow you to save your changes. StorageCraft's mounter allows you to mount to both drive letters and to specified directories (called "mount points") so you are not limited to 26 concurrent mounts. Symantec's mounter, like its image browser, is rather resource-hungry (uses a lot of memory) and is simply incapable of mounting multiple terabyte-sized volumes concurrently. I don't have benchmarks on terabyte-image mounting for Acronis StorageCraft's mounter allows you to mount *hundreds* of terabyte-sized volumes concurrently. This can be easily done by creating a full image, and then many incremental images with modified data, of a particular terabyte-sized volume, then mounting the full and all of the incremental images concurrently. Each mount should present a full terrabyte-sized volume. Large volume support is critical to the enterprise, and is becoming more common on desktops as well.

Disaster Recovery: To recover from a disaster, where no OS exists on your machine, or to restore an image over your existing OS, or to restore an existing image to a bare machine (one whose hard drive is blank - this is called "Bare Metal Recovery/Restore"), you must be able to boot some OS under which the recovery software can run and have access to the backup image file(s) and to the hard disk controller and hard drive to which you wish to restore the image. Acronis uses a bootable recovery CD based on Linux. StorageCraft and Symantec both use a bootable recovery CD based on Windows. In my opinion, the Windows-based recovery environments are superior for Windows imaging products because they contain a larger set of device drivers on the CD for greater device coverage. This means that you are more likely to be able to access your backup images from your network, media, or USB device, and to be able to see and access the drive to which you wish to restore the image, using a Windows-based recovery environment than you are with a Linux-based recovery environment. It's very important that you test the recovery environment BEFORE a disaster occurs to ensure that it can see your drives and the location on which you're saving your backups. The StorageCraft and Symantec Recovery environments are very similar. StorageCraft provides some useful options which are not available from Symantec. For instance, StorageCraft's recovery environment, at the start of its boot, allows you to choose if you wish to boot with the minimum or maximum driver configuration. If you don't need to access exotic drive or network devices, the minimum configuration is usually sufficient and boots much faster (usually around 2-3 minutes faster). For the enterprise-conscious user, both StorageCraft and Symantec ship their recovery environment with a tool that allows a remote administrator to manage the recovery environment, however this tool is free of cost from StorageCraft yet quite expensive from Symantec. Acronis and Symantec advertise that they allow you to restore an image to a different machine (aka "Universal Restore"), however in my experience I have been disappointed by this feature in both of these products as I have *never once* succeeded in restoring to a different machine (in many test cases) using LiveState or True Image. Acronis and Symantec will allow you to restore an image to a volume which is smaller than the volume that was used to create the image. A typical user will create one big primary partition that consumes their entire disk. For these typical users, if they plan to restore to a hard drive that is smaller than their original drive, then this feature is an important point to consider.

Deployment: The installation experience for these products is very different from one to the next. For the enterprise user, Acronis' enterprise product actually consists of several separate (and unintegrated) product installations. This is an akward and time consuming affair. Acronis's install is not dependent on the .NET framework. StorageCraft's install is a single installation file which contain all features, fully integrated (the total installer size is 9MB). StorageCraft's install is not dependent on the .NET Framework. Symantec's installer is a single install as well, however it does depends on the .NET framework, and therefore can be quite lengthy and consume a good deal of disk space.

None of these products are perfect, and like I said, I'm biased, so play it safe and evaluate them all.