How are you primarily using FirstDefense-ISR?

[Leapfrog Software]

Greetings All,

I am curious as to how users are using their FirstDefense-ISR software. I am using it for high availabilty(freeze and archives) and to maintain an optimized snapshot for gaming. How are you using it?

[sukarof]

I use it basically the same way as you + I do beta testing too. I would also use it as a multipel build for multipel users, that is if there were any more users om my computer Would be perfect for that purpose too.

[starfish_001]

Basically the same here - just have 2 O/S at moment.

Also use Recvoery Commander instead of sys restore - had it before FD-ISR


I use TI for bare mental restore

[ErikAlbert]

I've read several posts about FD-ISR and if I would buy it, I would use it mainly for system recovery.
FD-ISR is faster than an Image Backup/Restore and saving time is an advantage at my age.
It depends on how much I will need FD-ISR, time will tell.
For the moment Image Backup/Restore is enough for me and it's certainly not a waste of money, with or without internet connection.

[Peter2150]

I am using it for Disaster Recovery in conjunction with Beta testisng. Also use the Archiving as a backup medium.

Pete

[spm]

I decided to give FD-ISR a try today. Test system contained about 20GB of data, and I anchored about 3GB of this before making an initial 'secondary' snapshot. 15 mins into the snapshot creation, FD-ISR estimated the time to complete at around 3 more hours. Mmm. I didn't hang around, but stopped and uninstalled FD-ISR.

I can create a complete drive image to an external drive in 30 mins. OK, so it will take longer for me to restore from the image, but if it takes 3 hours to create a snaphot with FD-ISR, who cares? So what's the big deal with FD-ISR?

[Leapfrog Software]

Greetings spm,

3 hours ! Wow. During a copy the FD-ISR copy engine is at the mercy of the hardware to transfer the data as fast as it can. Many things can effect this. Available RAM and the fragmentation level of the disk are the most common. I am running a 2.4Ghz P4 w/1GB RAM, 2 80Gb IDE drives in a RAID0 configuration and see ~5000-6000 Kb/sec transfer speeds. If you contact their technical support department they can assist.

btw: Once the first copy is made, all succedent copies are differential, thus reducing the time to update a snapshot to only the changes in the source snapshot.

I hope that helps.

[starfish_001]

Originally Posted by spm

I decided to give FD-ISR a try today. Test system contained about 20GB of data, and I anchored about 3GB of this before making an initial 'secondary' snapshot. 15 mins into the snapshot creation, FD-ISR estimated the time to complete at around 3 more hours. Mmm. I didn't hang around, but stopped and uninstalled FD-ISR.

I can create a complete drive image to an external drive in 30 mins. OK, so it will take longer for me to restore from the image, but if it takes 3 hours to create a snaphot with FD-ISR, who cares? So what's the big deal with FD-ISR?

I have big snap shot like you and they do take a long time to create but they are full uncompressed hidden copies. Updating does not take long.

Oh it is a bit faster if you change the priority to high

I to use TI to make external images and yes it is quick but FD guess you the ablility to run O/S in different states and switch in an instant. Great for testing betas etc

For me this is one of the best things I have bought

[spm]

Originally Posted by Zoolander64

3 hours ! Wow. During a copy the FD-ISR copy engine is at the mercy of the hardware to transfer the data as fast as it can. Many things can effect this. Available RAM and the fragmentation level of the disk are the most common. I am running a 2.4Ghz P4 w/1GB RAM, 2 80Gb IDE drives in a RAID0 configuration and see ~5000-6000 Kb/sec transfer speeds. If you contact their technical support department they can assist.

My test system runs a 3GHz P4, 512MB RAM, 80GB IDE. For testing purposes, I ran 'clean', with all apps, incl. a/v, etc., unloaded or disabled.

Originally Posted by Zoolander64

btw: Once the first copy is made, all succedent copies are differential, thus reducing the time to update a snapshot to only the changes in the source snapshot.

Sure, I appreciate that. That said, first impressions are key. I might give it another chance sometime, if and when I have a few hours to spare.

[Acadia]

I use it for recovery and for testing new toys. Creating a new Snapshot, about 4-5 gig, takes between 9-12 minutes. Updating an already created Snapshot takes between 2-4 minutes. Creating or updating an Archive Snapshot on my other hard drive is MUCH faster.

Acadia

[Leapfrog Software]

Arcadia, what type and capacity hard drives are you using? What transfer rates are you seeing (Kb/Sec)?

[Peter2150]

Originally Posted by spm

I decided to give FD-ISR a try today. Test system contained about 20GB of data, and I anchored about 3GB of this before making an initial 'secondary' snapshot. 15 mins into the snapshot creation, FD-ISR estimated the time to complete at around 3 more hours. Mmm. I didn't hang around, but stopped and uninstalled FD-ISR.

I can create a complete drive image to an external drive in 30 mins. OK, so it will take longer for me to restore from the image, but if it takes 3 hours to create a snaphot with FD-ISR, who cares? So what's the big deal with FD-ISR?

Hi SPM

That time does seem awfully high to me. It takes me about 35 minutes to create a new snapshot on the same disk (13GB), but after that the refreshes take an average of 5 minutes.

What is the big deal you ask. Simply this. I do a let of beta testing, as you know. Before I install a new beta I refresh my other snapshot(5 minutes as opposed to 30minute). Then if, and I've had it happen, a beta trashes the system, again the recovery is 5 minutes as opposed to however long an image recovery takes. That time difference is significant to me.

Note, I haven't actually created a new snapshot in months.

Pete

[spm]

Originally Posted by Peter2150

Hi SPM

That time does seem awfully high to me. It takes me about 35 minutes to create a new snapshot on the same disk (13GB), but after that the refreshes take an average of 5 minutes.

What is the big deal you ask. Simply this. I do a let of beta testing, as you know. Before I install a new beta I refresh my other snapshot(5 minutes as opposed to 30minute). Then if, and I've had it happen, a beta trashes the system, again the recovery is 5 minutes as opposed to however long an image recovery takes. That time difference is significant to me.

Note, I haven't actually created a new snapshot in months.

Pete

I do appreciate the value of something like FD-ISR, but given the times I encountered it simply wouldn't make sense. That said, my last image backup started horribly slow (a prognosis of approx 4 hours), so I rebooted and tried again. That time, it returned to its normal 30-40 mins.

I suspect another product - of common interest to us - which I was testing at the time. As and when I get the time, I will give FD-ISR another chance.

[Acadia]

Ok, I just created my first Snapshot from scratch in a while. It was an Archive Snapshot on another hard drive. It ended up being 4.03 gig (compressed) and took exactly 9 minutes 0 seconds.

Acadia

[Leapfrog Software]

Greetings Acadia,

Those are very good speeds. Your average would be ~7400 kb/s. Not bad at all.

I primarily use FirstDefence-ISR for trialing software before I buy. But I bought it for Disaster Recovery (luckily I am not prone to many disasters) so use for it has changed. Currently I'm trialling Norton IS 2006 on one snapshot and Panda 2006 on another. This is the reason why I value this FD-ISR so much I value and appreciate more now than when I purchased it.

I've selected beta testing/ sandbox (poll) as this is the closest.

[Bdiamond]

Using WinXP with a 1.6GHz Pentium4 and 1.0Gb installed memory, it took 15min to install a 3 Gbyte Primary Snapshot. A secondary update took 8 min. These measurements were taken following a format of an 80 Gbyte HD.

[bigc73542]

I am useing it for system recovery, haven't had to use it yet though. I created a snapshot in about 55 mins. on a 100gb Hdd with 13.5 gigs used on the c drive partition and nine gb on norton ghost partition. It seems like a reasonable time considering that I have over 320.000 files on the C partition alone. and then the same on the G partition. not counting sys restore.

bigc

[Blackcat]

Disaster recovery, beta-testing/testing of new software and using the Archive function as backup.

Further since I like swapping primary AV's around I can install AV's on different snapshots without potential conflicts. Currently running KAV 5, Dr Web and VBA32 on separate snapshots.

[dallen]

I am using it for High Availability/Recovery and in combination with Image for Windows/DOS the two make me feel invulnerable.
I hear a lot of people in this forum talking about Acronis. Personally I have no experience with their software, have not even seen a screenshot. However, I have have a bad experience with the latest Ghost product. To the best of my knowledge Ghost and Acronis have one thing in common. They both operate within windows and try to take a still shot of a moving image. I like Image for Windows/DOS because you can take an image from within DOS and this allows you to get a still shot and in my opinion a more reliable image.

[crofttk]

Hi, folks ! I'm glad to finally see a dedicated forum for FDISR and will be visiting regularly !

I use FDISR for disaster recovery, beta testing/sandbox, AND, as I just completed a couple of days ago, for periodically (once a year ?) rebuilding my Windows XP OS snapshot from scratch and ditching the old primary snapshot. I keep staggered primary snapshot copies plus a "virgin" Win XP snapshot on my system drive and archives on an external USB drive.

I too have seen long projected completion times when creating initial snapshots, but those projections usually resolve themselves within the first 5 minutes or so into something much more reasonable. This typically happens if my system hard drive is heavily fragmented, nearly full, or if I have multiple or resource intensive tasks running in parallel.

I just created several new snapshots since I implemented the new one and from the log I see that the average speed was around 5640 KB/sec for creating a snapshot on the system drive (a 7.74 GB snapshot in 24 minutes) and 4300 KB/sec for archiving a snapshot to the external USB drive. (Nah, I don't do data anchoring since I keep all data in a separate partition).

My typical daily secondary snapshot updates are only 0.25 to 0.5 GB and take around 1 to 1.5 minutes.

I'm running FDISR on a Dell Optiplex GX-260 with a Powerleap upgraded P4 Intel CPU at 3.2 GHz w/ HT and 2 GB of RAM. I've got 2 x 250 GB SATA internal hard drives and 2 external USB drives - 320 GB and 400 GB. This is networked with 3 other PCs in my home (Netgear 10/100 VPN firewall router) and I use Retrospect for a file based backup of all machines nightly.

Oh yeah, and I have FDISR & PerfectDisk installed (and, yes, licensed ! ) on all 4 of my PCs. I've been a RAXCO FDISR and PerfectDisk customer since around 2002 or so.

P.S. I also toss the occasional IFW/IFD image of both internal disks onto one of the external drives for good measure.

[worldcitizen]

I've had FDISR for a while but stopped using it when I bought Kaspersky Pro. I know there is a workaround now but still don't feel safe using it in case I turn on NTFS streams by accident and can't boot.

Also I am always reluctant to use any programs which change the MBR after a bad experience with GoBack years ago. I forgot to uninstall GB before I re-installed Windows and couldn't boot. Had to take the PC to a shop costing me $55 to get it going again. Since then I'm wary of programs which may change the MBR and can cause my PC to get stuck in a loop at boot if I do something wrong.

Is it safe a idiot proof?

Dave

[dallen]

Originally Posted by worldcitizen

Is it safe a idiot proof?
Dave

Dave,
I'm pretty stupid and FDISR has withstood everything I can throw at it. Combine FDISR with Image for DOS/Windows and even a caveman can be trusted with your computer.

[worldcitizen]

Hi Dallen,

Thanks for the encouragement.

I wonder what would happen if I accidentally re-installed XP over First Defense. Would I be able to boot? I tend to forget those things.

What AV are you using? My subscription for Kaspersky is up. Happy with it but is there anything new on the horizon worth getting? What about DCS? They were supposed to be bringing out some new program ages ago but nothing so far. Are they still in the business?

Cheers

Dave

[Acadia]

worldcitizen, with FD there is never any need to reinstall XP, just keep a freshly installed XP snapshot somewhere. There are even instructions at the Raxco website on how to do a clean install of XP on an already "polluted" system.

Acadia