Backup with ShadowProtect Recovery CD

Gary,

May I suggest that even though this method will work perfectly,there is no real point in first deleting the volume before restore-its just a matter of personal preference.
Its not mentioned by SP and of course,the restore will fully overwrite the previous install.
As regards restoring the MBR and Hidden Tracks(this will restore the first 63 sectors of a drive),SP do recommend enabling both-they were originally backed up and restoring them certainly will do no harm-but in practice quite often I dont enable them.

 

Hi guys,

Thanks for the feedback. I think I now understand the procedure to reatore track 0 (with SP) so if I get the time to do it, I'll give the restore a shot tonight.

Btw, I also don't see the rationale for deleting the volume before restoring the image. I never do that when restoring with DS and it has never failed me!

JA

 

I'm not sure I understand what is meant by "Hidden Track". Can you SP gurus please tell me what that is? Does it mean Track 0, or all non-Windows tracks on the entire partition (or what)?

Edit:
Please disregard the above, as I found its meaning in the user-guide:

Just what Hairy Coo said (had I paid attention) ...duh. So I will definitely restore the MBR & Hidden Track in order to recover Rollback Rx's changes to Track 0.

 

Jo Ann,
As a fellow DS & RB user, I'm very interested in hearing about your success/failure in achieving a complete restore of your System-RB partition using SP, especially since you found SP creates all-sector backups faster than DS.

 

Success!

It was nail-biting time when I started to restore my SP image (not really, I had a DS image in reserve). I selected Restore MBR, Disk Signature and Hidden Track which brought me to SP's final restore wizard. Once it started running, the restore of my C-partition finished in just under 6 minutes.

Upon restarting my laptop, I was relieved to see the Rollback Rx sub-console and Windows booting up as if nothing happened. Finally I clicked on the RB icon in the system tray and there were all of my RB snapshots!

The one negative I found in SP's restore process compared to that of DS is that it takes a few more steps, but once underway it was fast and perfect.

It's past my bedtime and tomorrow starts a new work-week, so I bid you all goodnight.

 

That's a very interesting report Jo Ann. Bottom-line, would you recommend SP over DS for EAZ-Fix and Rollback Rx users?

 

Yes restoration is always the exciting part of any Image Backup software. I know the feeling. That's why so many users do only backup and restore only, when absolutely necessary and sometimes restore goes wrong, because it was never tested for real.

 

Hi Jo Ann,

Thanks a lot for performing those tests and sharing the results with us. Now that you have proven SP can backup and completely restore RB/EF system volumes, it joins other disk-imaging programs (ATI v11, IFD/IFW and of course, DS) which have been shown to be capable of doing that (when used properly).

Besides SP beating out DS in both of your tests, I must admit I was very surprised in the comparitive performance of DS in your two tests (where DS ran so much faster in the second test than the first). I would never have thought that VistaPE would be a much better bootup OS than BartPE/WinPE for running DS.

Very interesting!

 

Jo Ann,

Would you please inform me how you created the SP Recovery CD with DS on it and what software was used to accomplish this?

thanks,
Ron

 

appster, I too was very surprised and would never have discovered the 'VistaPE advantage' had it not been for doctorow's comments. But they are what they are - I'm confident as to the accuracy of those tests.

rostrow, I've received a few pm's with the same question and I'm happy to share that. I used the program UltraISO, but there are others (e.g., MagicISO, etc.) that can do the same thing. These programs allow you to actually open and edit the contents of any iso.

Using UltraISO, I opened the SP CD iso and simply copied snapshot.exe (from its Program Files folder) to the SP CD iso. I then saved the new iso and burned it to a CD. Since DS is not part of Storagecraft's iso design, when the modified CD has booted up you won't see DS. You have to use File Explorer (or something like that) on the left side of SP's main menu to navigate to your CD-DVD drive. Then open that drive and you should be able to access DS.

Hth,
JA

PS. Pete, I never considered that issue - oops!
(but seeing that SP came out on top in my testing, Storagecraft would hopefully see this for just what it was - strictly an academic exercise).

 

Great testing, Jo Ann .

I was intrigued by your results and so have run some further tests to see how they compared here and came up with some interesting differences.

I did this on my ancient laptop I use for testing but it is obviously the relative figures which are of interest. The backups/restores are all to a second internal hard drive and the RB/EF partition is 15GB with XP showing 9GB of it used. There are about 9 snapshots in all and there are no paging or hibernating files on the source partition.

First, booting up the SP boot CD and using SP I got:

Backup: 11m 53s
Verify: 4m 20s
Restore: 8m 22s
Backup size: 5.8GB

I then tried DS and to allay any concerns, there is no need to tamper with the SP iso as you can run DS from within SP itself . If you run SP and select the file browser, you can then run DS from wherever you have it saved. It seems slightly odd but it works fine. The results for DS were:

Backup: 11m 38s
Verify: 7m 02s
Restore: 12m 08s
Backup size: 5.5GB

So, on my setup, DS was slightly faster backing up but some 50% slower verifying and restoring.

However, on a whim, I decided to try DS via my UBCD disc and came up with the following:

Backup: 11m 17s
Verify: 4m 21s
Restore: 11m 53s
Backup size: 5.5GB

That one started to make my brain hurt to be honest and the implication is, I guess, that this is all very dependant on the particular build of whatever flavour of boot cd you are using at the time.

All of the images restored fine with all snapshots intact.

Graham

 

Graham, I am puzzled by your Backup Time results (when using DS with UBCD4Win), especially since your system partition is quite similar to mine! Could this be due to our using different versions or builds of DS?

PS. I just noticed that you accessed/ran DS on/from your hard drive to backup (after booting up with the SP CD), whereas I ran DS directly from the CD to backup. I can see where DS would run considerably faster from a hard drive than from a CD - or is it entirely in memory when executing?

 

Wierd, isn't it? I used the same copy of DS for all the backups and that was V1.38 dated 24th May 2007. I guess the 'easy' way to rule that out is to repeat the tests using the latest DS available and see if that changes things.

I think that our VistaPE figures are broadly similar and so it may be down to the drivers included in our particilar build of UBCD.

I think that DS runs in memory once executed and so this shouldn't make a difference. In fact, I tried running it once from the partition that I was replacing and it worked fine .

Graham

 

I can't speak for Jo Ann, but I would say that if your current disk-image backup provides for imaging all sectors on the volume being backed up and if it can do so from outside WinXP (or Vista), then stick with it.

 

Could the difference in Restore time be due to SP not doing a verify and DS doing a verify after a restore operation?

Ron

 

I think you mean doing a verify after a backup operation. If that's what you meant the answer is no - In my tests I was very careful to time the backup and verify sessions separately.

 

As Jo Ann says, if you meant verifying after the backup then no, as I also carried out the verify as a seperate operation.

Graham

 

maybe i miss something but to me verify is equal to a restore,as such i always did it this way.Up until now i never verified my images though,what i do is that every image is multiple times copied to different ext. harddrives in case an ext. drive get toasted,what can i say more,never had any problem with SP as i use it from 4/2006.

Everything from the CD,no install !

 

Jo Ann,

Why can't a verify operation apply equally to a restore? How are you sure the restore read-write operation was byte-for-byte successful without verifying it?

thanks,
Ron

 

Ron, most disk-imaging programs provide for image verification after backup and some also provide an image verification option before restoring.
After the image has been restored it's a 'done deal'.

 

Gosh Aaron, I think they both do a terrific job. If you already have DS (I think I recall that you do), I don't see enough reason to buy SP. If you don't already own an image backup program, I would have to recommend SP - there isn't much (if any) cost difference, overall SP is somewhat faster than DS and you get a really nice GUI Recovery CD with SP (that's sorely lacking with DS).