Any alternatives to System Restore?

It is because....from the Farstone website:

"NOTE: There will be no version 8 of RestoreIT. If you own a copy of RestoreIT or RestoreIT Pro and are looking for Vista® support, please go to the Upgrade Center and enter your serial number to purchase a copy of DriveClone 3...or DriveClone 3 Pro.... DriveClone 3 Pro includes RestoreIT functionality."

 

BTW - for anyone who is interested...so far the only issue I have found with Rollback Rx on my rig is a slowed boot time. This has gone down from approx 45 secs to 110 secs.

Now, Horizon Datasys are aware of this as they say that they did have a more general problem before v8.1 (current release) and that after this they still believe that 1-5% of user may experience this afteer going tot he latest release.

I have contacted them directly on this (have a support ticket open with them) and have fed them back information about this glean from using BootVis. They have recently replied to me as follows:

"...our developers have already looked into the issue, and should be able to develop new version with better performance."

and

"...the new version might need take several weeks,..."

but they seem responsive and intent on improving the product.

If interested take a look at:

http://support.horizondatasys.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=4443

Overall I am liking what I see when compared to GoBack, which was good as far as it went but is limited in a number of areas IMHO.

Cheers


Baldrick

 

Baldrick,

Thanks for the input. I think I'll go along with the same "Once a Week" defrag too.

That way, I can delete any unneeded snapshots before I defrag and save a bunch of time.

I really liked GoBack too, but Norton/Symantec stopped improving it and it won't support Vista, so it was an abandoned product. It was a good one that I personally thought had a lot of potential, but Symantec seems to be less and less supportive on ALL of their products. Their Tech Support is almost non-existent, especially when compared to the fast response you got from Horizan on RollBack Rx.

Tim

Regards, Tim

 

Performance is the same reason for which i dumped rollback rx, esp , when compared to fast disk imaging softwares.

Boot time increase is just too much.
Also i had problem when the system fails to hibernate , if didnt have hibernate enabled in the baseline.
I need facility with which i will use the pre-os just when there is a problem, ( MBR changing property has to be optional using a cd or something )instead of running it everytime..

 

Hi raakii

Yup, I see your point about the hibernation...lukily I do not use that feature on my PC (no need).

I also have Acronis True Image, which I use for a once a week full image copy (just in case) but find that it takes an age to make an image and a fairly long time to restore it.

Since v8.1 Rollback is apparently faster than it was (most users, but unfortuantely note me at present, see only a 10% increase in boot time) and hopefully if they can get to the bottom of my problem then all will be well.

Also, I have just noticed that Rollback will take and restore a full image so I may be able to dispense with ATI as I do not really use it for anything other than the imaging.

Wil have to check that feature out...who knows.

 

10% increase in boot time is great for me , becos i am usually restore images once in 4 months normally .(and that process takes 4-10 minutes at a max).

Those who test a lot and have frequent restores may well use it.

 

Thanks for that. I have noticed all those issues during my short trial which is unfortunate because its actually quite a good app.
Strangely i don't seem to have the rollback boot time issues that you mentioned. While the boot up time is slower once its installed its no where near as extreme as yours.

 

The one major downfall of rollbacks built in disk imaging is it cannot backup all the snapshots. It will only backup the snapshot that you are currently in. Plus rollback has to be reinstalled after restoring your system. If you want to image all your snapshots you'd have to use trueimage's sector by sector imaging option.

 

Hi Farmerlee

Not quite true...this is recommended but as stated in the Help:

"If the target drive has Rollback Rx installed (we recommend you to uninstall Rollback Rx from the target drive before restoring a backup image to it, but if you didn't), you must check the Restore MBR option."

But not ideal when compare to ATI.

 

Hi Farmerlee

Have been looking at this in more detailed as I was puzzled and am now confused as the Help says that Rollback Rx provides:

"...a simple and effective drive imaging solution, it allows you to backup partitions and disks to an image file. The image file is a
clone image of hard drives."

In otherwords, if I have understood correctly it does what ATI does in normal (non sector by sector) mode; takes a full image of the disk in question...which is what I want as a back up. Granted, if and when you restore using this image you do not have the snapshots available going back but in my mind that is not an issue as one would just be glad to get ones disk back.

Any thoughts? Am I misunderstanding something here?

 

Yeh it works the same as true image normally does. Its just not adequate should a person want to retain multiple snapshots.

 

Cheers for the clarification. Sounds like as that is all I really use ATI for I could replace that with Rollback. Cool!

 

ISR softwares can never replace disk imaging softwares , that is all i have to say.

Imaging is a necessity, rest is luxury.

 

If you have the need the you are most probably right but as I said I only use it to take a back up once a week as a real back up. And Drive Image, which does the imagining in Rollback Rx seems to do the job.

Cheers