FarStone TotalRecovery Pro v9.0 Build 20121101 released

http://www.farstone.com/software/totalrecovery-pro.php


What's new in TotalRecovery Pro V9?
Release Notes
2012/10/27 Total Backup Recovery v9.0 Change List

Support Window 8: Support all Windows 8 including Window 8 Pro, Windows 8 Enterprise and Windows Server 2012.
Differential backup added
Source Files Exclusion: Exclude any files/folders from backing up in disk/volume backup.
Enhanced scheduler and quota management: Flexible settings.
Support Refs and ExFat file systems: Refs is applied to Windows Server 2012.
Redesigned UI: Main UI and all flows are simplified and prettified for Windows 8.
Enhanced Virtual format conversions: All images backup can also be converted to VMDK or VHD.
Add Recovery Manager boot entry: Users can boot into Recovery Manager for file or system restoration.
Add Image Mount entry : Users can preview image content from it.
Add all current storage drivers into Recovery Manager.
Support Overwrite installation from V8 or later

screenshoots:
http://www.softpedia.com/progScreenshots/DriveClone-Pro-Screenshot-74668.html

 

It sounds very solid. Did anybody use it?
Can it make cold imaging?
Were there any issues that its live cd cannot read system partition (like it happens with Paragon and Macrium)?

 

Yes I have used this extensively. While not my main imager right now, it has never failed me. Yes, it can take cold images. Those are the only ones I do.

 

I have to say the new interface is very impressive! I will be kicking the tires hard on this one.

 

Better than before, but still not very attractive.

It is still too big in size

 

I agree Andy. Farstone is usually pretty good at what they do, but the size is an issue with me also. I actually have their Restore IT 7 app with 3 licenses I bought off of eBay a year or so ago for 19.99, but have never used it yet.

I did use Restore IT several years ago and was quite happy with it at the time when I used XP as far as a rollback style application. It was very consistent from what I remember.

Have a good day

 

This is the bomb, the new update, a defo improvement. We have talked about this product before in the forums. I have been using this since it was drive clone. the earlier versions of 8 where flakey and they removed the "mount image feature" in that release. It was in version 7 and was needed big time, dont know why they removed it. Any how i have not had any problems with backups and universal restores. Version 9 supports universal backup with restore. So i can backup up a workstation cold using the boot cd and restore to dissimilar hardware. fantastic. mount image is back and the overall version is very stable, works great on windows 8 too. The main products i use is Farstone and Easeus Todo backup and paragon. The server versions of farstone, easues, support remote backup over lan networks from one machine. a nice feature. The products that have failed and let me down are Arconis, was a good product back in the day. Macrium reflect a bag of bones, backup failed straight away and a few more i could mention. Remember folks Farstone was one of the first or maybe the first to offer the universal restore feature. Dont sleep on this software peeps. this is a dark horse in the backup game, as i say. I image and universal restore a lot on worksations and laptops. Give Easeus a try as well.

 

The universal restore sounds great. Did anybody used the universal restore function?

 

Yes it does work. I backed up a workstation live and from cold (Boot Cd) and universal restored to totaly different hardware, new mother board, different CPU, The program both times asked me for (dissimillar restore) All i had to do was install a driver when finished for the new mobo. Works sweet as a nut. The farstone 9 totaly rocks, a very solid program and they have ironed out the previous issues. Also you can mount the image and extract files in cold and live. Enjoy folks

 

This sounds cool!

 

What is not cool is when employes of companies come in here only to advertize their products and not identifying themselves as such.

Their comments are useless to some of us...

edit. And by the way if you need support stay away from Farstone. Back in 2007 I had made some support requests and I'm still waiting for their answers...

Panagiotis

 

Hmm, I never thought about such a possibility.

Thanks.

 

You are welcome

When in doubt just klick the posters name and select "find all posts by ...".
It will give you a better view of his comments and credibility.

And I am not in any way against employes coming here and promoting their products. But the least they should do is to identify themselves first...If not, they are just trolls and all they do is to add "noise/interference" to the threads.

Panagiotis

 

Well said Panagiotis. I have often wondered about such things. I agree, I would think it much more respectable if someone was honest with their motive instead of maybe trying to be 'stealth' about their activity. Open and honest is best policy, but it makes me cringe when it is done in a deceptive fashion, not that what they say is necessarily wrong, but the manner in which they handle themselves. it would be nice to have a Farstone rep or employee here. I too have read much over the years about the lack of Farstone support. If they want to regain reputation, they should come here openly and share discussion. I actually bought Restore IT to try on Win 7 about a year or so ago from ebay with 3 licenses and registered it with Farstone, but never used it because I backup regularly with imaging, and because they do not have a good rep for support and follow up if any issues arise.

Great points made Panagiotis Thank you!

 

ot posts removed

 

Well, I had a bizarre experience while trying out the latest version 9.03. First, I installed the program, which is huge (bloat), and it simply was too much for my liking. Install went fine, but upon opening the program, it was obvious that my dual core Dell laptop 1.73GHZ with 2GB RAM was struggling with just getting the program to launch. I expected as much so I went ahead and created the built in Winpe disc boot media.

I then booted the system with it...using a boot CD Recovery Manager. It took near 5 minutes to finally boot up. It is an incredibly complete Boot disc offering backup/restore functions and a host of other tools. So I decided to try taking a cold image. Went well, minimal interaction in setting it up to ready it to image, and it does not allow you to name the image, it only asks for destination. I would rather control the naming, but I started the image process. It appeared to go well, fairly fast. Mounted the image, all this using just the boot cd, that also worked fine. Restore time came to try it out. THIS is where it became the most odd experience I have ever had after using disk imaging apps for over 10 years.

I purposely prepped the OS partition, Win 7 by formatting it. I then booted into the Recovery manager, clicked restore, and browsed to the image I took. Upon hitting next, to choose the destination partition to restore, it had preselected the wrong partition, a novice user would have made a bad mistake here, but I caught and set the correct partition to be restored, then it warned me about partition structure, which i assumed it was seeing it had been formatted by me previously, but in NO way had the partition structure been tampered with, it seemed to tell me it needed formatted again?, and gave me a choice to continue, so I figured ok. So I began the restore process after carefully going over the choices. Restore appeared to go fine, no complaints and was fairly fast restore, 5 minutes or so.

Now the odd experience. I noticed right before I began to restore, it had checked "Dissimilar Hardware Restore"...which it was NOT, so i unchecked that and finished restore. Upon rebooting, the boot up took much longer than expected, and when I arrived inside Win7, there seemed to be a lot of disk activity, as if it was actually restored to 'dissimilar' hardware, installing drivers maybe, etc. Some appearances of certain windows prompts had changed and I knew something was not right. I then looked at the partition information and to my shock over 2GB of DATA had somewhere been added to my normal 6.5 GB OS partition (the actual size of the data on a 90GB partition). Now it was showing over 8.8GB in data

I did not even waste the time trying to find the reason for the increased or added data that was showing up. I quickly rebooted and formatted the partition again on purpose, and restored an image I had taken using Macrium Reflect free 5.04995 via a Winpe boot disc. As usual, the Macrium restore was fine, and things were back to normal, and I realized there was something very odd about what just happened after using total recovery pro to restore an image. I had never had such a bizarre experience, and I am thinking that I must have done something wrong, but i went back over the steps and I was very careful about my choices, and I am not new to using these applications.

Any idea at all how or why after restore, my actual partition size of data had grown over 2GB? It makes no sense how this could happen and how many novice users would not have realized something had drastically been altered or changed after restoring. This is simply the most bizarre experience I have ever had with ANY imaging app. It definitely added something during restore, and it was not a good thing! I am going to contact Farstone support and try to find out how this could happen, with a simple backup and restore. It acted in my opinion as if it had been restored to different hardware, but it was nothing of the sort. Strange, and a bit scary.

As far as their support goes, I AM happy to say that I recently emailed Farstone support, using their ticketing system in regards to RestoreIT that I own 3 licenses to and it is registered, but i have yet to install it as I just use imaging. They got back to me within 2 hours, so it does appear in this instance their support has improved, at least I hope so.

I used their RestoreIT app a few years ago and never had a problem with it as it did exactly what it was supposed to. I simply have not installed the latest version of it yet. But the experience with Total Recovery Pro as detailed above in a short form, was truly bizarre. I could not personally recommend this, but I do want to see what support says about my experience, as I have never witnessed this kind of behavior for a simple restore of a partition image. There is no rhyme or reason to what this product did, and I cannot see any step that I missed, in fact I caught it making the wrong decisions for me, and even corrected them, such as the huge blunder of pre-selecting the wrong partition to restore too. Farstone products are generally well respected, but something definitely went wrong with this simple restore.

Jim

 

TRP version 7 was the best imo as it came with both disk imaging and ISR but now looking into other product for my new pc. Saw that some major OEM like Asus,MSI and Phoenix Bios has dropped farstone based product(Rebranded) because it failed badly. MSI bundled rebranded version of farstone RestoreIT on some of their laptop which caused lots of problem like system unresponsiveness and worse it "brick" the HDD(There's youtube video of it).

 

tested this version out when it came out and was not impressed. it seemed to do okay till i went to restore. then i had boot up issues and it messed up the 4k on the drive, set it to some sierd number i dont remember right now also its a huge mess, it installs things everywhere and why do i need to take up all that space on my hdd and have all those things running just to make a backup. honestly i would use eseus before this and thats not a compliment.

 

Thank you for sharing your experiences with this. @zfactor, maybe what you described is why after I restored, I found I had over 2GB of additional 'data' showing on my OS drive. I still have not figured that out, unless maybe it changed the cluster size?, or whatever it did, it was not a simple sector based restore, and besides this version 9 was an all consuming bloated mess. I do not like nor will i use bloated software, as it is not necessary, and this goes for AV's, firewalls, etc.

I did go back and boot up with my RestoreIT CD and it has version 7.1 recovery manager on it, and I used this to make a backup. It is fast, but I have not yet tried a restore, but I am hoping version 7 plays better than 9. I do not have RestoreIT installed simply because I rather use imaging, but since the CD has a built in recovery manager, I tried it out. Clean interface for offline backup and restore, but the real test is restoring the created backup.

EDIT: After making the cold image, I went through the restore process using the older 7.1 version of Farstone Recovery manager. Restore appears to have went fine. Only thing that caught my eye right after restore process was complete, was it mentioned in the interface it was "modifying partition size". I thought why? Apparently it made no changes, but I would like to know what it modified, possibly alignment?...I have no idea but it booted fine and was sector based, and I checked the layout of the disk in Mydefrag and it was the same. By the way, I formatted the OS drive before restore just like I did in version 9. Also, upon restore this older version 7.1 had the proper selection made to NOT use universal restore, but to use 'original system'. Overall, it appears to have done the job fine. Wish I could say that for version 9. I am still perplexed at what happened with that. I cannot imagine novice users using this especially when version 9 wanted to perform a 'dissimilar restore' by default. No wonder folks find themselves in a tight spot just trying to figure some of these issues out, or worse, having a program choose for you and making the wrong choices. Version 7.1 did the job quite easily...at least so far.

It gives new appreciation for IFW/IFL and Macrium that does what they are supposed to without taking liberties to alter anything you do not tell it to.

Thanks zfactor and GSL for your thoughts.

Jim

 

Hi GSL

I agree...as noted above, version 7.1 of Total recovery pro recovery manager did both cold imaging and restore as it should be. Version 9...it appears is a step backward unfortunately. I often wonder, if something works and is reliable, why make changes that break it? Farstone appears to have had a decent product in version 7, but certainly not now in V. 9 based upon my experience with it. If their changes were only to support Win 8 then something has gone wrong.

Jim