All Image by Towodo Software

Check this out. A possible potential. Nice clean interface. Compiled in C++. Also supports bzip2 high compression and command-line.

http://www.towodo.com/products/allimage/

 

On default compression its fast and same compression size if not quicker than other ones like for like. Put it on bzip2 compression and the filesize was 400mb smaller than DS though it was 5 mins longer to do it. 3.89Gb for All Image, 4.4Gb for DS. It worthy if you need small filesizes backing up onto dvd especially. Interesting none the less.

Just when you thought you seen all image software. I surprise myself with another. lol

It had a few different features to others.

 

markymoo, if you decide to try All Image, I would be very interested in hearing what you think of it, especially of it's ability to restore an EZ/RB environment.

This does look very interesting - btw, would you know which OS the recovery boot disk uses?

Thanks for bringing All Image to our attention!

appster

 

I had a brief blast with it. There is no recovery disk. You have to use in from bartpe if you wanted to restore c - Its main benefit it has tighter compression over the others but at a cost of more time. The standard compression is no worse than the others we been using. It has a few cosmetic options and make USB bootable, self extracting images, mount images, image verify. Seems simple and stable. I like the plain modern interface and the spacious layout. I bringing it to attention as it has these features and seems nobody heard of it before and the makers have made an effort. I can't fault it. I said DS is great because it free but i forget it isn't free but quite expensive and over 2x the price of All Image. All Image just behind IFW which is just a few seconds behind DS. What's a few seconds? So it has all this going for it. What has DS got better than this just the differential and the few seconds faster. I can't see anything DS has over this than that. I actually hate the gui of DS. I used it till it expired. You know i'm a fan of IFW 2.0 and that has a large set of options and isn't even finished yet. All Image has alot of DS features but it won't do differentials. All Image is great value and is great if it has all the features you need. I like that if you save the image with the compression extension it compress it automatically and so on. If you don't mind abit longer doing the images and want them small as possible that bzip2 compression is a boon. It interface is alot more professional modern than DS has. It will backup/restore from command line. It takes up 3Mb on pc. All Image is still in recent production so if you request some features maybe they would listen and they put in differential then...So like i say for the money which is £12 and the options you get its extrodinary good value. It uses MS VSS technology to backup. Try it. IFW is £20 and DS is £28.

 

Thanks for the overview and comparison. The one thing you didn't address above is if you tried to create and restore your Windows partition (with EZ snapshots) and whether All Image was able to accurately restore the entire MBR.

 

i havent even done a restore with it yet. i learnt all the above without doing a restore. i will stick it on bartpe and see if it runs. yes i will.

 

Ok i copied just 3 files from All Image that were needed to an external USB then booted up BartPE and All Image ran from the external fine. It said i had a new 14 days trial to test it. I backed up Drive 0 including all sectors. I then proceeded to wipe all of the first 63 sectors on Drive 0 to zero. This removed the MBR and any partition. When i restore the image it like it's being restored to a completely new drive and i know for sure that All Image was restoring the Eaz-Fix MBR or not! If it didn't boot after the restore then i know the MBR wasn't there. In the restore there was a drop down box reading partition 1 and detailed info on my hard drive there was no mention of restoring MBR back. I then proceeded to restore the image back to Drive 0 and it did fine. I rebooted and it booted up fine Eaz-Fix console came up and i was back in windows. Checked the other snapshots and there were fine. So its a PASS. It backs up and restores MBR without any intervention needed. All you do to restore is select your drive and press Write.

 

How big is your restored image,and the time taken to restore ?

Huub.

 

markymoo, based on your initial testing it seems as if AI is better (and cheaper) than DS and perhaps even IFW. And at $25 (US), it is reasonably priced.

I just downloaded and installed AI and I notice there's a Boot Disk Wizard (in the Disk pull-down menu). When I selected it, it said something like 'No USB Flash Drive Found' but does this imply that AI is able to create a USB Flash Drive boot recovery disk (if I had one)?

 

It was probably fast at the time the image was created.

 

You can't make judgement just by looking at a screenshot thats not fair appraisal. The figures jump and down and it obviously being backed upto a USB stick as the size of drive is only 250mb and USB sticks are slow.

I have currently a 10gb for short while so tests are done with 10Gb(8Gb data) partition. DS backed up in 4.48 mins and All Image took 6.40 mins both without verify and all sectors on. DS reported 11mb/sec and All Image reported 24mb/sec reading. All Image excels on smaller image size using the bzip2 compression.

@appster

The Boot Disk Wizard is used to make USB stick bootable. You can boot dos or xp ntldr,boot.ini files also. If the command line options work from dos i be very surprised. It doesn't mention All Image running from dos. It lets you create custom size disk images so you could create big custom floppy sizes perhaps. Thats useful.

Sorry for slow response, i maxed out the post limit for the day so i couldn't post.

 

As mentioned many times before,doing a restore is the ultimate test in imaging so let us hear about your experience with this app.

 

After reading the documentation and 'playing' with AI it seems apparent (to me) that AI was not designed to backup a Windows partition, but rather to make image backups of USB flash drives. While it can create a sector-by-sector image of a Windows partition, it does not provide a means for stand-alone recovery (although as markymoo has shown, it can be run once you are booted into a Windows environment) nor does it seem to be optimized for backing up and recovering a large system partition.

 

it will backup any partition you want, just because it has option to make usb bootable don't mean thats its main goal but it's a sideline option lol - DS doesn't come with a a stand alone recovery either nor does IFW.

 

DS does operate and very well i might add as a stand alone recovery. I do it all the time across partitions in both imaging/verifying then restoring. Of course you were likely referring to a full drive recovery from a single drive. DS can also 100& safely recover a Whole Drive as a stand alone when used from another drive, Slave/Master accordingly. It's that versatile!!!

 

DS does provide a DOS stand-alone boot disk builder (granted, it is very cryptic!). But what I meant was that every other program designed for disk-imaging (that I've tried) provides some kind of boot disk builder. Even IFW provides IFD!

AI took 4 min longer to backup my 16GB system partition (with RB) and resulted in an image that was about 1GB larger that an identical backup with DS. After seeing that, I didn't even try to restore the AI image!

markymoo, I don't come close to your expertise on this subject, so if you don't agree with me that DS is a better solution than AI for imaging a system partition I would not argue the point, but I would just like to understand your reasoning if you feel that AI is the better of the two.

appster

 

A delay Huppi , i didn't ignore you i didn't save the results so i had to do again.

10Gb entire 8.55Gb data - all sectors

Drive Snapshot
data backup time 4.37 mins
verify time 1.07 mins
restore image 4.02 time mins


All Image
data backup time 6.12 mins
verify time 1.50 mins
restore image 5.40 mins

 

Right, but imho if it were not for the 'Rollback scenario' every disk-imaging program I've tried pretty well does the job!

 

appster booted from All Image and ran it from another hard drive so he maybe under the assumption it wouldn't run from BartPe when in fact it will, so that's a recovery format in itself. IFD is not a fast recovery solution when you got to restore a 100Gb+ partition so i don't call that an ideal recovery. ShadowProtect comes with WinPE recovery so that is good. You can copy any program to a BartPe cd and it will run. Plugins for BartPe enable programs to show up in the Start Menu and other little tweaks. He was meaning i believe it don't come with a recovery cd like Paragon or a boot disk for dos. Yes DS is a recovery but has to run from a dos disk, BartPE, or as you mentioned another drive. All Image won't likely run from dos but thats no hardship it will run from everywhere else as DS and yes you don't have to rely on a BartPe you could have a spare drive or usb stick with another XP you could boot from instead. The problem comes when the hard drives all go down from a power spike or something then you have to rely on an external recovery. Making your own recovery disk solution is not hardship. I'm not saying All~Image is better than Drive Snapshot as it doesn't have differential as isn't as fast but it's half the price and has the features you need and some that others don't have.

I don't flood my BartPe with lots of unecessary programs. I just have IFW,DS and MBRWhiskey,mbrwizard and Active @Undelete for image and data recovery.

How do you manage with the restore when you have unallocated space with DS?

 

IFW & DS are just as fine backing up just the data. IFW and DS lack a fancy frontend like ShadowProtect but IFW does have more options and the automatic verify which is a plus. SP has a scheduler built in but you can simply use the XP Task scheduler. You can't just move SP around and run it from any location as it comes with armadillo protection which makes it bloaty. SP is 2x the price and lets not talk about the backward Acronis TI 11.