FARSTONE DRIVECLONE 5 PRO/iT Professional v7.1.0

HI THere

anyone test this new programs? i read somewhere here these progs modify the partition by create a hidden one...

will be nice to hear from ppl about there experience in this isue ..how they compare to EAZ FIX and ROLLBACKRX??

cheers

 

I watched the flash demos and the snapshot feature reminds a little bit of EAZ-FIX. The creation takes a little bit longer it seems, like 30-40 seconds. They dont say how many system snapshots you can have but in the demo they had several per day so I guess you can take as many as you want. I cant determine if they are independent somehow, but it seems like there is no need to fiddle with a baseline, which is a showstopper for me with EA.
It requires 200MB for the hidden secure area where it stores the changes made by snapshots. So I guess there is some kind of similarity with EF

Now if the imaging part of Driveclone can restore all the snapshots without hassle, then this starts to look interresting.
I think I will try this one.

 

Oops, just tried to install it and Drive clone install told me that it is not compatible with Avast AV and terminated the installation

 

i just try to install drive clone 5 and its said i have ATI install which i dont and quite the "snapshot feature " ticked.... . i uninstall it few days ago...very wierd this one....


cheers

 

Months ago I tried to install the older v3.x and it said I had ATI installed, which I didn't think was correct. However, upon examining my system's registry I found remnants of ATI were there.

This new version sounds awesome - I may just try it.

 

I uninstalled Avast antivirus and installed Driveclone.

Installation went fine in my Vista (FDISR) snapshot, even though it took long time. I guess it did that because of my probably very defragmented c: drive. Driveclone needs 200MB (you can change that if you want to) for the snapshot changes and I suppose it used most of the time to clear that area. I noticed that DC, during install, created files named VPART001.rit to VPART007.rit the size of every file are 2.09GB with a total of 15GB on my D drive (D: drive is the other half of my partitioned boot drive) I have no idea what those are for...?

There is no tray icon. DC loads 6 processes (about 38MB total) during system boot.

A snapshot takes about 30 seconds to make on my rig. It takes about 2 minutes to restore to a snapshot, excluding normal windows booting time.
A image takes 20 minutes to make. The size of the image of my 32GB drive (with FDISR and three snapshots 2 XP and one Vista) is about the same as with Ghost 12 and Shadowprotect - 19GB.

As I said I installed DC in my Vista FDISR-snapshot, I can boot into my XP snapshots without any problems. In EAZ-FIX I could not do that, I am told that I have to install EF in all snapshots in order to work.
But when I return to my Vista snapshot where DC is installed, DC warns that some external program has changed the drive so all the snapshots are lost (I come back to my last snapshot before reboot.)
Sometimes a DC process starts to grind the hard drive for 15-20 minutes. I dont know why and that is a bit annoying.

First impressions:

I like it so far. Finally I can use two OS´s and different configurations of the operating systems (even though it comes with the price that you loose the earlier snapshots when booting between FDISR snapshots).
The snapshots are not made as fast as in EAZ-FIX (10 seconds) but are way faster than FDISR (5-6 minutes for a new snapshot) If the restore goes fine,
I have yet to try the image and see if all the snapshots are intact (and to see if DC does reliable images) but a friend called and wants to go out and party so I will come back to that, then this seems to be a good alternative for me who has some reservations about EF.

 

I don,t think that it,s a software to be used along with FDISR.

 

What I want are these multiple and fast snapshots when I test things. I keep FDISR for now coz I want to have Vista and XP and different configuration of those and as long there is no problems, and so far they work fine toghether, well except that all snapshots disappear after I´ve booted back and forth between FDISR snapshots. But I can live with that for now. Right now I am using DC as I used EAZ-FIX.

But if the snapshots are persistent (ie doesnt disappear when imaging) and imaging are reliable I might drop FDISR. Well, I´ve said that before, but well see Will do little bit more testing first.

btw doesnt acronis have multiple snapshot technology also? Or did I dream I read that somewhere?

 

ATI- I don,t think so.

 

I did a restore of the image i did yesterday. It had 3 snapshots.
Restore went fine, it took 30 minutes.
But not only did I loose the snapshots, I also lost the ability to make new snapshots after the restore. The "take snapshot" options is greyed out.
And that ends my testing of this software. It fell on the simple rule I have - the restore of an image should produce a exact copy of the drive, first time, every time without hickups.
Maybe it is the fact that I have FDISR onboard, not that I see how it can affect anything.

 

Hi Sukarof,

My experience is different to yours.

I restored a backup of 30gb successfully in about 13 minutes.
DC then created a new secure area, MBR record and reinstalled some drivers.
It then restarted and created a new snapshot-Windows loaded and all was normal-the whole operation took an extra 2-3 minutes.
DC was fully functional.
Any other ISR previously installed,like Rollback or FDISR would need reinstalling.
This seems common for all apps that load MBR code,as does DC

You are of course correct,all previous snapshots are lost-there is no archive capability as with FDISR, individual snapshots cant be retained.

Still interesting-some impressions below.

 

This one is quite unique

Combines several functions all in one, unlike any other.
(1) backup data only if required
(2) ISR snapshots similar to Rx-with preview
(3)sector based imaging of drive or partitions only and incrementals with preview
(4)Clone a drive or partition to a new drive
(5)Universal Restore: Restore a complete system image of a particular configuration to different hardware or a Virtual Machine.
(6)can create a Bootable Rescue Disk.
(7)supports Linux,some RAID

As regards speed its quite acceptable in all areas,as System Snapshot and Hard Drive Imaging both have sector level backup functions.
Backup of a 30gb image took 18 minutes,restore took about 13 minutes plus another 2 for resetting DC to a functional state,as detailed in previous post
The snapshots take about 30 seconds -restore is similar to Rx

Still testing,but so far the impression is favorable,possibly for a user who needs an ISR and an imager all in one app,which is fairly simple.

The scheduling isnt finely graduated and generally there are not many options,but all the important functions are there.

The unknown is reliability.
The main issue is the fact that after an image restore all previous snapshots are lost-a new start has to be made.

 

Thanks for your input Hairy coo. Once again we see that software doesnt behave the same in all configurations. Wonder why though.
I am a bit intrigued that yor restore was so much faster. But maybe it has to do with the two FDISR snapshots. Maybe aigle is right that DC gets confused by FDISR.
To bad it couldnt keep the snapshots. I would´ve thought since it says it is sector based imaging it would keep the snapshots it had when the image was made. I liked the snapshot aproach in this software though.

After the first restore with Drivecopy I uninstalled DC and did a restore with Symantec Ghost to a incremental I´ve made prior (in my XP snapshot) to installing Drivecopy. Remember that DC was installed in my Vista snapshot.

Ghost failed (dont remember the error code right now) so I decided to use the Drivecopy restore CD I´ve made and restore to the image again. The restore went fine but this time when I logged into windows DC wanted to uninstall itself...
That was a bit weird.

I did not have to reinstall FDISR, the snapshots was still there and FDISR was functional, after the reinstall of the image with Drivecopy.

 

ko hairy coo

does DC5 create / modify your hd partition? coz acording to a "ticket" i send to there support team they said YES.

anyway i canot install DC5 coz its said i have ATI which i dont ! even search and del all reg key reguard to it + use some reg fix programs...

a "ticket" send to there support and they reply with ==> "there is maybe more ati regs..." hehe , welp thats i know , but no real help beyond that

cheers

 

Have you had any conflicts with FDISR so far sukraof? Have you tried restoring FDISR snapshots and restoring DC snapshots? Are there any boot issues?

Sounds like a more reliable RollbackRX type-thing. If it works nicely with FDISR I might well give this a try.

 

It's important (to me) that the imaging/restore process capture and restore ALL of my Rollback Rx snapshots, so I use Drive Snapshot (very successfully) to do that.

Since Harry reports that DC5's image restore process does not restore ALL snapshots, I really don't see any reason to consider this over Rollback Rx (or its clone, EAZ-Fix).

 

I could boot between my FDISR snapshots without any problems, the only issue I encountered was what I mentioned earlier:

I have now uninstalled DC since it didnt work well in my setup. I did not try to restore archived FDISR snapshots.
As long as I didnt boot to any of my FDISR snapshots the Driveclone snapshots worked well. The snapshot creation time was very reasonable (about 25-30 seconds) and the restore of any snapshot was reasonable too, even though it took a little bit longer than with EAZ-FIX.

 

Thanks for your answer Think I'll give it a whirl.

 

DemonEye-Good find

Dc creates a Secure Area,which is a virtual partition. It uses free space on the hard drive,adjustable for size, to create this new storage location. This location is hidden, protected, and accessible only by DriveClone.
DC of course is written into MBR preboot code
.
It also has a Pseudo Drive which is a virtual space created in the Secure Area. DriveClone Pro utilizes this space to reduce the backup data of System Snapshot and increase backup efficiency.
Cant understand why ATI stops you-is snapman.dll in Windows/sys32/drivers? systems?
DC is definitely worth trying!

 

Appster,
Have been thinking about that one and have been wondering whether its necessary for me,as I very rarely use any other than the current or last Rx shot.
DC also seems to coexist with other apps better and at this stage I would assume a normal defrag is also possible.
In my opinion,definitely worth considering,its the only app that combines an ISR,Imager and separate data backup of quality,all in one.
The doubts are about untested reliability and the attractive GUI needs a bit of getting used to-plus the operations feel a bit clunky.

 

Unless you have jv16 PowerTools (imho the best reg cleaner/finder there is), I suggest running regedit > Edit > Find [enter 'Acronis' into the box] > Find Next. If it finds anything delete it and keep repeating Find Next until it exhausts all items in your registry.

 

i did thid also... some reg file contains acronis title cant be del....what a wird since i uninstall it from add/remove software ..


cheers

 

demoneye-go to the Acronis threads here in Wilders-this problem has been discussed a lot there and all the answers and the routine are there.

 

Possibly because my computer may be more powerful for this type of work,sukarof-its a dual core which,as soon as I unleash it- goes berserk!!

edit: have also uninstalled.

Its the only app which has ever stopped ShadowProtect backing up-an incremental backup with DC failed and an autostart app. wouldnt load.
Wasnt satisfied with the reliability,but still feel its worth testing,its still unique.
On another machine,may prove to be exactly what someone needs.

 

Or you can send a ticket to Acronis through their web site and ask for instructions on how to remove all traces of TI 11.
There's 16 steps to doing it.
If Acronis would just spend some time on their uninstaller it would be great.
Good luck.
Hugger