Alternative to True Image (nervous nellie)

I have successfully tried DriveImage XML via BartPE Plugin. I tried both default mode imaging and Raw mode and snapshot was restored in each case. It is a bit slow esp raw mode.
Disk C 15GB was imaged with around 8GB data on it.
Image size approx 4.5GB with compression
Imaging time 14 min
Restore 13 min
NO image verification option though.
Raw mode image time and restore time about 40 min.
So if anybody asks for a free imaging programme, I willl recomment this. Tried first time and it worked like a charm, nice GUI and easy to use. Image can be taken from even within windows like IFW/ IFD.

 

First automatic scheduled backup of four partitions on hard drive when without a hitch tonight with ShadowProtect. Really a fast program inside of Windows XP and restoring from boot disk is very fast although recovery boot disk is a little slow. However, hardware support and fast restore and if you lik fast backups from recovery Cd outweigh the negative in myh opinion.

Gary

 

Are you saying that it takes some time to boot the recovery environment CD?

If so, then let me point out that the first thing that the ShadowProtect recovery environment does, which occurs immediately upon boot of the CD, is to ask you if you wish to boot with minimal or maximum driver support (at least you have such an option with ShadowProtect - Ghost for instance will always boot with max driver support even if it's unnecessary). For local disk-to-disk backup you'll usually be fine booting with minimal driver support, which can cut a minute or two off of the boot time. If you didn't use the minimal configuration, try it out. If that's the one you did use, well, nuts, that's a minimum WinPE configuration and is about as fast as any WinPE-based recovery environment can boot these days...

Oh, also, you can speed up the boot of the recovery environment by cancelling the load of the network drivers when it asks you if you want network support. If you don't need the network, there's no reason to slow the boot by loading network stuff.

We have some ideas as to how to dramatically speed up the boot time of the recovery CD, but other new features are more important at the moment, so that one'll sit on the back burner for the time being.

 

Yes, I did see that and will use that option. Again, I like the driection this product is going and right now am enjoying it very much. Lok forward to the new releases in future.

Gary

 

This thread has been a feast!!

Let me preface what I am about to write with the disclaimer that I have never used any other recovery utilities than Ghost, up to V9 for a long time and with success, but now abandoned in favour of FDISR and Terabyte's apps and both are working well for me with great support and no failures of any advertised functions to this point. I am a very basic home user with 4 winboxes for home and business:

@greeneggs'n'ham

I assume you are one of the develpers for Storagecraft.
Correct me if I am wrong but you have not identified your position vis Storagecraft.

You have been making truly great and educational posts and been referencing various other back-up utilities with insight and respect.

I am giving serious consideration to trialling your apps.
It is apparent that your main interest is with enterprise customers; as it should be.

You have made some posts that i would like to query more specifically re home users:

Does the "crippleware" version fully uninstall?

What is the point of a nonfunctional trial?
Will the "eval" version fully uninstall?
I also went through some hoops trying to get a functional version and was given v.vague pricing guidelines some months ago when I was first looking for alternatives to ghost: one of the reasons I went to Terabyte.
Terabyte offers fully functional trials.
How beholden are you to MS?

There are multiple plugins for higly effective imagebased recovery systems for the free BartPE

I will snip some of this for sizing;

The Terabyte utilities do (almost)all of that and more if you include BING: specifically baremetal resroration, even to new and virgin disc in same machine, restore over current OS on same partition, restore to different partition and reorder boot sequence.
Incrementals are not possible with current Terabyte apps.
As referenced in this thread there are some good reasons not to have incrementals/differentials cf;defragging and "broken chains"
There may be others I dont know about?
I think Drive snapshot (which I found too hard to use) can do all of the above recommendations.
From a home user POV 2 of the three utilities you mention Acronis and Symantec are the "whales" of this sea all others trail well behind in terms of saturation advertising and "independent" reviewing
IMHO while Ghost/ Live state recovery and Acronis ( never used it) are well credentialled apps they may not be easy to use, have grown to staggering sizes at installation, have been known to hose systems and in the case of Symantec are notoriously difficult to remove. Ghost user with experience are well aware of the limitations of current releases without bootable DOS discs.

So: IFD or IFL or BING: ??
and;

IFD with Phylock scheduled imaging for home users at least.

Agree

IFD/IFL/BING

That is impressive.

Yes: difficult +++
Waiting for Terabyte to release their new utilities for hopefully differential/incremental imaging/back-ups. Heh: etymological inexactitudes: diff v inc

This is not an attack, rather an attempt on my part to analyse some of your posts from my biased POV. Since getting IFD et al I have also sort of lost interest in this debate as they work so well for me so far, but your postings prompted me to visit your site, run the vids (cf Terabyte vids), great for dodos like me and honestly I am intrigued.

I assume your apps will run on Vista already?
How long will you support XP?

Regards.

 

Hi Longboard!

Before I respond to your questions, let me repeat a few things that I've said before. If you've found the solution that works for you, GREAT! Stick with it! It's important that you carefully identify your own individual needs when you select a backup solution. Many talented home users can cobble together passable free solutions.

Several of your questions appear to reference a post that I made in which I was specifically addressing the "enterprise or extremely-discriminating user." For these users, downtime, or excessive resource utilization, is generally not acceptable, and so only solutions that support efficient incremental imaging are viable. That's why that particular post only referred to ShadowProtect, True Image and Ghost.

That being said, yes, you're correct, I'm one of the senior engineers at StorageCraft. I was also one of the core engineers who developed DriveImage/Ghost.

The Trial version of ShadowProtect is only crippled in the sense that it doesn't include the bootable CD recovery environment. All other functionality is fully intact. Trust me, you can get a very good idea of the product's functionality by installing and running the trial. You can hot image all of your volumes, mount your images (read-only or writeable) to drive letters or mount points, restore your images to any volume other than the boot volume or volumes containing pagefile, schedule automatic backups, perform full, incremental, and differential backups. To restore an image of the OS to the boot volume itself, you of course need to boot into a recovery environment. So, essentially, the trial is fully functional as an installed piece of software. The only thing missing is the separate recovery environment, which really is a separate piece of software. The Eval (available upon form request) includes the recovery environment. We simply can't expose it to public download as we must pay Microsoft a royalty whenever we distribute a WinPE-based recovery environment ISO. Your point about BartPE is interesting - I'll have to discuss this with our team but I can't give any promises at all on that right now. All flavors of ShadowProtect will easily and fully uninstall. In fact I think you'll find that installation/uninstall of ShadowProtect is a remarkably light affair, given its feature set. The installer itself (and there is only one installer, not several) is only 9MB total.

You also asked how long we will support XP. We'll support it as long as Microsoft supports it, which means for many years to come. Yes, we're actively testing our software on Vista to make sure that it's ready for the release of Vista.

A side note: You mentioned "Drive Snapshot". While this product may work just fine for the home user, I would advise the Enterprise user to use caution if they are considering adopting it as a solution. Drive Snapshot employs what is generally considered to be a dangerous technique (dispatch table hooking) which enables it to dynamically insert its volume filters into the storage stack. The net effect is that Drive Snapshot can install without the need to reboot, however the cost is that it employs this risky (and frowned upon) technique. Ask anyone in the main driver development forums (OSR's NTDEV and NTFSD email lists) or any of the DDK team at Microsoft what they think of dispatch table hooking in an enterprise solution and you'll find that it's not advisable. Just do your due diligence - test the heck out of it and especially do interop testing with other volume filter drivers. Who knows, perhaps Tom Ehlert's dispatch table hook is solid. It's a cool trick, that's for sure.

 

I've now been able to get IFD to create, validate and restore images successfully but I had to do the following:

1) remove my RAID1 mirror permanently.
2) change my hard drives to operate under Standard IDE rather than AHCI or RAID (done via the BIOS). this subsequently resulted in a reinstall of XP.

There's a FAQ page on the Terabyte website which outlines possible causes of validation failure.

Been testing it on my system and it works fine. Had a look at StorageProtect and it looks very promising. It sounds like a good balance between TrueImage and IFD/IFW.

@grnxnm -
Would it be possible to request a full evaluation? If anything, I'd like to test that StorageProtect Desktop will successfully work on my system for my system volume (in particular when making and restoring "cold" backups). Do you ship a physical copy of the recovery cd? Or is a temporary download link made available to the requestee? I ask this because I'm not based in the US and would ideally like to test this sooner rather than later (as I'm in the formatting my pc).

At the moment, I have 1 physical disk with 2 partitions C: (OS, Apps), D: Data. I assume it's straightforward to create and restore a full image of that particular disk (both partitions and MBR)? What happens regarding pagefiles and hibernation files?

Thanks,
K

 

@autokilo
good stuff. Remarkable support isn't it. Using their apps has given me a lot of insight into how systems work and even how to configure them better and with better hardware.

@grnxnm

Thankyou for very courteous reply: that is an impressive CV. I appreciate your bent towards enterprise applications: heh, even my crappy little business now lives or dies by the winbox sword. Believe me it is hard for small businesses to get good back-up strategies. There is a gap between home users and big enterprises where the cost/function/maintenance balance is against us "cornershops". Frighteningly enough I am my own Business manager and IT support, and have never had training in either.

Cool.
Saw the D/l size and am very impressed.

I also have a lot of questions cf: from Pete:

Also I have questions about RAid, USB support, drive interface types, drive letter asigns, size of images, speed of image creation and restore, baremetal restores, restore to active partition,Interactions with MBR and PArtition table and boot.ini, migration to new HD, migration to new up-spec box, conflicts with any running utilities and others.

I want to read the KB and forums. The forum support was a bit "patchy"? in the recent past.
I suspect here may not be the best palce to continue this; can I post in the forums and get good reaction.?

Regards.

PS "we" have had manyproblems with other "snapshot" utilities: any liklehood of same recurring?

 

@longboard - the support is good. responses have been quick and concise. Though to be fair, I had to figure out the RAID1 and AHCI stuff on my own ^_^ Not exactly sure why IFD / IFW won't play nice with my RAID1 setup.

I was hoping to throw another question out there to any IFD users. I have 3 identical physical disks configured like so:

Disk1: 2 NTFS partitions C: (system), D: (data)
Disk2: 1 NTFS partition E:
Disk3: 1 NTFS partition F:

I want to basically clone Disk1 onto Disk2 or Disk3 and boot off that drive.

I'm guessing that I'll need to:
1) I make images of C: and D: using IFD onto say Disk3 (which will act as storage for images).
2) I then run IFD and restore image for C: onto disk 2
3) I then run IFD and restore inage for D: onto disk 2

What I'm not sure about is if there are other things I need to do. Do I need to create a new MBR for Disk2?

 

autokilo

BING (BootItNG) is tailormade for what you want to do
Image and rstore partitions to your secondary discs.
Set up tailored multiboot options.

Check it out, you will be amazed, if you want to run multiboot setup you may need to install it rather than use from floppy.

Be a bit careful with image restore and size of partiton. You may think you have 10g on 30g drive ie "10G" image size, but, the data may be spread across 25G of disc space and therefore will need at least 25g partiton to restore to.
here:
http://members.shaw.ca/bootitng/
http://www.heffy.com/image.htm
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/support.html

Read, watch the vids.
There are links to terabyte vids on the terabyte page

Having watched the vids , read the manual and all will be much clearer !!
Then goto Kb and scroll around to get the feel.
If everthing goes pear shaped you will still have your utterly reliable image files to restore and start over

Regards.

 

Hi, autokilo.

As Pete pointed out above, IFD will write a standard MBR to the drive you restore a system partition to if it doesn;t have one already. As long as your Drive 1 has a standard MBR, i.e., you aren't using FD-ISR or some other program that relies on modifyinig the MBR, you'll be OK on that account.

The only other thing that comes to mind that may need addressed:

1) You'll need to remove Drive 1 from your box, or at least unhook the cabling OR change your cabling to designate Drive 2 as your boot drive before your box will boot from Drive 2

2) If Drive 2 is a significantly different drive from Drive 1 insofar as hardware design or interface, Windows may have a problem booting from it as you've transferred all of Windows' information about the system drive from Disk 1 to Disk 2. However, since you were using Radi1 up until recently, I'm going to guess that your Disk 2 may well be identical to Disk 1.

I can't think of anything else at the moment.

ETA: Oh, I just now saw longboard's response. Well, I have no qualms with any of that but I was assuming you wouldn't be doing multiboot, I don't know why I assumed that. Probably because cloning, per se, (at least in my experience) is done to replace the source drive physically after the source drive fails.

 

Yes, of course, and I didn't say that in my post but I should have for completeness ! Thanks, Pete.

 

@Peter2150

ShadowProtect doesn't modify the MBR in order to operate. ShadowProtect will always back up the MBR, as well as the entire first track, each time a backup is made. It's important that not only the MBR be backed up, but all 63 sectors of the first track need to be backed up, because products that inject boot loader code into the MBR often also inject code/data into the additional "hidden sectors" of the first track on the disk. If you backup and restore only the MBR, there's the possibility that you have restored only a portion of a boot-loader-injected app. To be safe, you must back up and restore the entire first track, including the MBR. However, if you have a standard MBR, with no injected boot-loader code, then there's no need to restore the MBR or any of the hidden sectors at restore time.

A note on MBR restoration - a portion of the MBR is of course the partition table itself. The rest of the MBR sector is executable code. When we restore the MBR, we of course do not destroy the existing partition table, but rather we restore the CODE portion of the MBR.

At restore time, ShadowProtect will allow you to choose between these options:

1) not do anything to the existing MBR and hidden sectors
2) restore the MBR along with the image that you're restoring
3) restore the MBR AND the entire first track along with the image you're restoring
4) Lay down the standard MBR along with the image you're restoring.

I didn't realize that First Defense-ISR modifies the MBR in order for it to operate. This, to me, suggests that they're using an int 13h hook in order to filter disk I/O. A strange, and unnecessary, approach for a windows product. Windows itself provides a safe framework for volume filtering, which is interop-friendly. Any product that injects code into the MBR will almost certainly cause issues with other products that do the same. So, be cautious - make sure that if you use this product you never intstall some other software which also uses boot-loader code (such as a disk encryption product). It's a great recipe for very nasty interop problems.


@autokilo

To evaluate ShadowProtect Desktop:

http://www.storagecraft.com/products/ShadowProtectDesktop/Desktopedevalrequest.asp

To evaluate ShadowProtect Server:

http://www.storagecraft.com/products/ShadowProtectServer/Serveredevalrequest.asp

For eval, a temporary download link to the ISO for the recovery environment is made available. Download this ISO and burn it to CD. The CD is bootable and will allow you to use the F6 option right at the start of its boot process in order to load additional storage drivers from floppy, if those drivers aren't already present on the CD.


@longboard

ShadowProtect leverages Windows' own support for RAID, SCSI, USB, etc., by always running from within Windows (2000/XP/2003/WinPE), so you will have the same device support as you have from within Windows. I'm not sure what your question is about drive letter assignment, can you please clarify? As far as speed goes, we did a lot of benchmarks to ensure that our product's speed meets or beats the competition. We also did a lot of optimization to ensure that we use less (often far less) CPU and memory during our most intensive operations. Bare Metal Restore/Recovery (BMR) is of course supported using the bootable ShadowProtect Recovery Environment CD. Image sizes are only limited by the file system which contains the image files. FAT32 files can only be <= 4GB in size, so if you are backing up a large volume and storing the image on a FAT32 volume, ShadowProtect will automatically split the image into 4GB pieces (this is a so called "split image"). Also, you can instruct ShadowProtect to split the image at a particular size if you wish to later archive the split pieces to optical media (note that ShadowProtect doesn't *yet* support archiving directly to optical media). Image sizes when stored on NTFS volumes can be up to 2^64 bytes in size (truly massive). Assuming the partition is sufficient in size, you can restore an image to any partition, regardless of whether it is the active partition or not. At restore time, you can also decide if you want the partition to which you're restoring to become an active partition if it is not currently the active partition. See comments above regarding interactions with the MBR and partition table. I'm glad you mentioned the BOOT.INI - after restoring a volume, ShadowProtect parses the existing BOOT.INI file to ensure that the system is still bootable, and if the BOOT.INI is invalid it will patch the BOOT.INI so that the system will boot (and back up the original BOOT.INI). Migrating to similar hardware is not a problem. Migrating to significantly different hardware ("Restore to Anywhere") is not currently supported, however this feature will be in the next major release and is in fact 100% coded and we have been demoing it to partners (see paragraph below for more details). Speaking of "Restore to Anywhere," I'm personally very disappointed with the implemention of this feature in both Ghost/LiveState and TI, as I have never *once* successfully used this feature in either product. I hope that our solution will prove to be much more robust (I can tell you that right now, in alpha state, it's already way faster than the equivalent feature in the competitions' products, way easier to use (just check a box, no need to install anything else, works with all your older images unmodified), and already works in most of the cases we've tested it against).

When I say "significantly-different" hardware, what I mean by this is:
-Restoring to a machine that has a different motherboard chipset (VIA, Intel, AMD, SiS, nForce, etc).
-Restoring to a machine that has a different type of interrupt controller (PIC, APIC, etc).
-Restoring to a machine that supports a different number of CPUs (uni vs. multi)
-Restoring to a machine that has a different storage controller

Regarding "conflicts with other running utilities", or interop issues in general, and the problems the forum members have had with other "snapshot" utilities, it may be useful to understand the pedigree of StorageCraft's snapshot device driver. All complex drivers will occasionally have interop issues. However, the more exposure your driver has, the more likely you are to discover and fix these interop issues.

ShadowProtect's snapshot driver was developed by two DDK MVPs (MVPs are individuals who're globally recognized as being the most knowlegeable/helpful in a particular Microsoft-related technology - in this case these guys are world reknowned device driver developers). Our snapshot device driver is actually licensed by many companies for inclusion in their own products (Ghost, for instance, uses our snapshot driver, as does VMware, LiveVault, Dantz (in Retrospect), and a host of others). Due to its wide exposure over the years (it's been shipping in commercial products for around 5 years) and large install base (our driver is installed on literally tens of millions of computers), we've had the time and exposure necessary to shake out the vast majority of bugs.

StorageCraft's core competency has always been the development of kernel mode technologies (device drivers). In fact, for many years, StorageCraft was purely a tools vendor, licensing tools to other software shops to help them to build products. Over the last 2.5 years, we've transformed into a products company. I suppose that we just got tired of watching others wrap our technologies with GUIs and make insane profits from it. We figured we could probably make a better product as we are the actual developers of the core technology itself.

Rollback Rx does NOT use our snapshot driver.

 

thanks grnxnm, i've submitted a request for a desktop eval. i'll give the 30 day trial a go in the meantime.

 

I shouldn't have been so hasty to suggest that FDISR doesn't need to use an int 13h hook to implement its functionality because I haven't evaluated FDISR, and based upon your subsequent comment, that they provide pre-OS boot selection of a snapshot to boot, then indeed they would need an int13h hook to do this. It can be a perfectly valid technique, but users need to be aware that not only do int13h hooks rarely (if ever) interop properly with other MBR-injected code, but they also generally won't properly handle storage configurations that use host bus adapters that lack support for in13h and extended int13h (such as some SCSI and RAID controllers). No product is perfect, our own included. If FDISR works for your needs then that's what counts.

 

Got an email with a recovery cd link from StorageProtect. Spent a few hours playing around with both the ShadowProtect and the Recovery CD environment. I'm impressed with what I've seen. It's easy to use, easy on the eyes and performant. Making backups and restores is very quick. Bear in mind I'm running a pretty fast rig and while I didn't make any timings, it definetly felt substantially faster than IFD. I'm referring to the time taken to make the backups since ShadowProtect doesn't seem to have a validate / verify stage (or if it does, it's not visible to the user).

One thing I noticed about the Recovery Enviroment is that the drive letters don't match up with those under normal Windows XP. Only C:\ was correct, so make doubly sure before you restore to a partition.

Restores to a non system partition have been 100% both through Windows and via the Recovery Environment. Thanks Howard for the links you mentioned before. I was able to verify the accuracy of the restores using a binary diff between the actual partition and a mounted image via Beyond Compare.

There are some differences on the C:\ (my OS partition) which I'm pretty sure aren't the fault of ShadowProtect. I've listed the differences below:

Binary Comparison of <C:\> to <L:\>
13673 files in 861 folders

13619 files match exactly
-------------------------
<snip>

35 files don't match
--------------------
Documents and Settings\Ken\Application Data\Scooter Software\Beyond Compare\Session.bcse
Documents and Settings\Ken\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows\UsrClass.dat.LOG
Documents and Settings\Ken\Local Settings\History\History.IE5\MSHist012006091020060911\index.dat
Documents and Settings\Ken\Local Settings\History\History.IE5\index.dat
Documents and Settings\Ken\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\index.dat
Documents and Settings\Ken\Recent\C_VOL-b001.spf.lnk
Documents and Settings\Ken\Recent\Local Disk (E).lnk
Documents and Settings\Ken\ntuser.dat.LOG
Documents and Settings\LocalService\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows\UsrClass.dat.LOG
Documents and Settings\LocalService\ntuser.dat.LOG
Documents and Settings\NetworkService\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows\UsrClass.dat.LOG
Documents and Settings\NetworkService\ntuser.dat.LOG
WINDOWS\Debug\UserMode\userenv.log
WINDOWS\Prefetch\BC2.EXE-1910A8F2.pf
WINDOWS\Prefetch\NTOSBOOT-B00DFAAD.pf
WINDOWS\Prefetch\SHADOWPROTECT.EXE-14730E79.pf
WINDOWS\Prefetch\WUAUCLT.EXE-399A8E72.pf
WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution\DataStore\Logs\edb.chk
WINDOWS\system32\config\AppEvent.Evt
WINDOWS\system32\config\software.LOG
WINDOWS\system32\config\SysEvent.Evt
WINDOWS\system32\config\system.LOG
WINDOWS\system32\inetsrv\MetaBase.bin
WINDOWS\system32\wbem\Logs\wbemess.log
WINDOWS\system32\wbem\Repository\FS\INDEX.BTR
WINDOWS\system32\wbem\Repository\FS\INDEX.MAP
WINDOWS\system32\wbem\Repository\FS\MAPPING.VER
WINDOWS\system32\wbem\Repository\FS\MAPPING1.MAP
WINDOWS\system32\wbem\Repository\FS\MAPPING2.MAP
WINDOWS\system32\wbem\Repository\FS\OBJECTS.DATA
WINDOWS\system32\wbem\Repository\FS\OBJECTS.MAP
WINDOWS\system32\wpa.dbl
WINDOWS\Temp\61CF1529.TMP
WINDOWS\SchedLgU.Txt
WINDOWS\WindowsUpdate.log

2 folders and files only on left
--------------------------------
WINDOWS\CSC\csc1.tmp
WINDOWS\Temp\~DFE92D.tmp

17 files are unknown
--------------------
Documents and Settings\Ken\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows\UsrClass.dat
Documents and Settings\Ken\NTUSER.DAT
Documents and Settings\LocalService\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows\UsrClass.dat
Documents and Settings\LocalService\NTUSER.DAT
Documents and Settings\NetworkService\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows\UsrClass.dat
Documents and Settings\NetworkService\NTUSER.DAT
WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution\DataStore\Logs\edb.log
WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution\DataStore\DataStore.edb
WINDOWS\system32\config\default
WINDOWS\system32\config\default.LOG
WINDOWS\system32\config\SAM
WINDOWS\system32\config\SAM.LOG
WINDOWS\system32\config\SECURITY
WINDOWS\system32\config\SECURITY.LOG
WINDOWS\system32\config\software
WINDOWS\system32\config\system
pagefile.sys

Some of these are probably due to the fact I logged into Windows since the image was made, others are due to using BeyondCompare itself. I don't recognise all of the differences, but if anyone spots anything awry, please let me know ^_^

@grnxnm - can I ask a few questions?

1) There doesn't seem to a be a verify / validation stage after making a backup when running in Windows or the Recovery Environment (please correct me if I'm totally wrong). Is something happening under the covers like a CRC check or a CRC being embedded inside the image file?

If not, I did notice that a CRC check was taking place during a restore (can't remember if it was before or after the restore). Would this be the point where a user would be aware of a faulty image?

2) If I purchase a ShadowProtect license, what versions am I entitled to? I assume I'll get minor releases but I'll have to pay for major updates? Will this be at a subsidised price as it's an upgrade rather than a new license?

3) There's a windows service, ShadowProtectSvc, which is configured to Automatic startup. If I don't plan on using scheduled backups, is it ok to disable this service?

4) For every manual task I perform in Windows (be it a restore or backup), it appears in the Backup Jobs tab. Is it a bug because previously completed tasks are marked with Status = initializing whereas the details on each task clearly indicate that the task has completed.

I'll try to find time to set up RAID1 mirror (yet another reformat *_*) and give ShadowProtect a whiz through to see how it behaves with RAID.

 

That's true, during the WinPE boot session, the drive letters may be different than your normal windows boot session. However, you will be shown the volume label, partition offset/length, and containing physical disk, of each volume, so it shouldn't be hard to figure out which volume is which.

The file differences are indeed due to the fact that you are comparing a volume that has changed since the time that the snapshot was created.

You're correct that we currently don't expose a separate verify tool (we will in the next major release - I happen to be writing that very tool at this moment - it's around 80% done). However, all images contain CRC32 values which are *always* tested upon restore. If the restore detects corruption in the image, it will terminate with an error indicating that the image is corrupt. If your restore completes successfully then you know that the image passed the CRC32 test. Also, if you have encrypted or compressed the image, the decryption/decompression routines will return errors if the compressed/encrypted data has been altered (corrupted). Also, if you mount the image and scan through its contents without receiving any errors from the file system that's mounted on the virtual volume, this is another verification that the image is good.

If you purchase ShadowProtect, I'm honestly not sure what that entitles you to as far as major new version releases are concerned. I'll have to check with our sales dept on this. Certainly you can expect to receive all updates that occur on your major version (including service packs to it).

Do not stop the ShadowProtectSvc.exe service processes (there are two of them). All work is actually performed by this service. In a typical enterprise product architecture, the GUI doesn't do any real work, but instead acts as a portal to manage a service on any particular machine. In fact, both the Desktop and Server edition GUIs are capable of managing any number of networked machines from one machine's GUI.

It's by design that the manual backup jobs show up in the Backup Jobs tab. The reason for this is that you can re-execute these manual jobs from the backup jobs tab without having to go through the entire Backup Now wizard. It's a convenience feature.

In regards to using ShadowProtect with RAID configurations, if you don't see your RAID drives when you boot the recovery environment then try booting the recovery environment using the F6 option, which allows you to feed in the miniport driver for your RAID controller, at the start of the WinPE boot.

I'd be interested in seeing benchmark results contrasting IFD with ShadowProtect for backup and restore. I haven't done any benchmarks on IFD myself so I'm curious where ShadowProtect stands, performance wise, compared to IFD.

I'm glad things are working for you so far. Let me know if you run into any snags. The build you're using (that's available via the download link) is Ver 2 SP1. Our SP2 build has been in test for a while and should be released soon, and I'd recommend that if you purchase the product you apply SP2 when it's available.

 

It's not too difficult to work out which drive is which. Just wanted to make sure people didn't base their restore destination on the drive letter

You mentioned that the file verification is going to available in your next release. Is that the SP2 release you were referring to?

I've already got the F6 floppy drivers for the RAID / AHCI controller. It's just finding the time to do another reformat and setting up RAID1. I assume that if it all works right, only one of the drives will be visible in the Recovery Environment (a la Windows).

Is there any rough idea when SP2 will be released to the public?

Regarding point 4, I understand the convenience that previously executed tasks appear as schedulable (is that even a word?). It was more about their status (set to initializing instead of Complete). Is that a bug?

Thanks again for your assistance. I'll post back with how things go with RAID (most likely tomorrow).

 

Let me reiterate that image verificiation does occur, automatically, using CRC32, whenever a restore occurs.

The separate verificiation tool will not be released with SP2 - it will be part of the next major release which is a couple of months out. I'll see if I can send out the binary for this prior to the next major release, as the tool will be finished in the next week or so, to interested parties, but I'll have to get approval for this, so I can't make any promises.

We don't have a firm date for SP2. IMHO it could be released right now, but we're fairly cautious about not jumping the gun - and there are a couple of fixes that we made in the last day or so that I'd like to sneak into that build. It's basically a matter of everyone (engineering, QA, our partners) all saying, "Yep, this build looks good!" At which point we post the installer for download.

"Initializing" basically means that the task is waiting in queue and will, at some point in the future, execute a backup.

Here's a bonus for ya (AFAIK we've never mentioned this to anyone): ShadowProtect's mounter is also capable of mounting CD/DVD .ISO files to drive letters AND mountpoints (NTFS reparse points). This functionality isn't technically supported (meaning that if you have a problem with it, we won't spend much/any time working on a fix for it), and isn't exposed through the ShadowProtect.exe GUI, but you can use the command-line mount.exe tool to mount/dismount CD/DVD .ISOs. The ability to mount to mountpoints means that you're not limited to the 26 drive letters - you can easily have thousands of ISOs mounted concurrently. Mount.exe itself isn't supported either, but is shipped with the product for support purposes. Whatever you do, do NOT use the "mount.exe l" or "mount.exe u" options - they're for development only and you can easily mess up the mount driver's service key contents (HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\sbmount) if you use them. Also, sbrun.exe can be used to create .ISO image files of existing optical media discs. I'll provide the syntax if anyone's interested.

 

Apologies grnxnm, my post was not meant to give the impression that there was no verification. In hindsight, I should have chosen my words better. I just wanted to know whether manual file verification was going to be part of SP2.

CRC verification during a restore is all well and good, but that is IMHO somewhat problematic. You really don't want to find out a image is corrupt when you do the restore. You'd want to know when you make the backup.

Until SP2 comes out, is there a solid way for a user to verify a backup is good? I know you mentioned mounting and scanning through the files but is there a way to somehow extract or determine the CRC and perform the CRC check using another application? That to me sounds like a more exact / quantifiable way of verifying the image.

Again, I think I'm confusing the situation by not fully explaining what I'm seeing. I've run 7 manual tasks (all of them have completed) and I never re-ran a previous task. I just went thru the wizard each time.

As expected they appear in the Backup Jobs tab. What is throwing me is that 4 of the tasks are now appearing as "Initializing" when I've not tried re-running them or scheduling them in any way. The last 3 manual tasks I've run have gone to completed and stayed that way.

I've attached a screenshot which might clarify things

 

I'm with ya (I agree 100%), it's less desireable to find out that your backup image was corrupt after you've restored it... That's our primary motivation for making a separate verify tool.

Here's a temporary workaround for you. If you execute an existing manual backup job to create a Differential (click on the little down arrow next to the Execute button in the Backup Jobs list) this will cause ShadowProtect to ask you which image file you wish to base the differential on, and it will then perform a full diff of the volume's current state with the data presented by the point in time represented by the image file that you select. In this process, ShadowProtect excercises the CRC32 check on the image file that you selected. So, you can, in a round-about way, perform a full verify on the image file without restoring it (if you generate a new differential image of the volume and base it on the image file that you want to test/verify).

Hey, that's interesting (your screen shot - thanks for including it, it helps to verify what you're seeing)! I'll look into it on Monday. I doubt it effects functionality at all, it's just a peculiarity of the status string. You can likely still execute any of those jobs again without trouble.

Can you tell me, were all of your manual backup jobs identical? Did they all backup the same two volumes, or were some of them for just one volume and others for two or more?