FarStone RestoreIT 7

I'm Trialing this program from FarStone, and it looks like its a keeper. There are no system slowdowns or any other issues that I can see. This used to be called RestoreIT but this is a complete rebuild and is fast and smooth,

http://farstone.com.au/store/index...._id=27&zenid=bd8eba6ccc7955454d00396fa95d6305

 

Re: FarStone Snapshot Recovery

Dear DVD+R,

At the end of last year I tested two products from Farstone and their were RestoreIT 7 and Total Recovery PRO 7. Both were excellent programs, and the later was a big brother of RestoreIT 7, that not only it had snapshot capabilities but also disk-imaging/backup and so forth.

The snapshot capability required about 48gb of disk space and could be any drive on the system. I had setup on Drive D partition. It created the baseline snapshot within seconds and any new snapshots within seconds too. Also, it was the first menu even before the Windows was loaded and co-existed with any program that modified the MBR. You had the F4 key before the Windows was loaded. The things that I didn't like was:

1. 48gb of disk space, which it created and earmarked though within seconds.
2. Even then the disk space was not enough and after couple of snapshots it had to delete the old snapshots to make room for the new ones. Though it was fast and at the same time loved the disk-imaging capabilities.

My questions:
1. Is the menu same before the Windows is loaded, and it appears now that it is F1 (looking at the picture) instead of F4?
2. What are the disk (space) requirements?
3. How many snapshots can be saved before the disk space is used up?
4. There is no download link for trial purpose?

Many thanks in advance!

Best regards,

KOR!

 

Re: FarStone Snapshot Recovery

Hi KOR, To answer your questions:

1: •Pre-Windows Recovery F4



2: •Small Disk Space Requirement
Image compression and incremental backup technology mean that Snapshot Recovery takes up just a small portion of hard drive space on most computers ( I found this to be approximately 10% of your hard Drive capacity to create the Safe State
3: •Unlimited System Restore Points
The number of saved restore points is restricted only by available disk space (About 64000 snapshots in a 48GB safe state)


4: •Download link in on the page I posted, it is on the right, orange border under system requirements.

I have discovered however If you have Acronis True Image Home installed and run the GUI you will encounter a Blue Screen crash. Apparently Acronis and this program are incompatible.

 

Re: FarStone Snapshot Recovery

The program's FAQ states: "be aware of the following applications, which is conflict with system snapshot: Norton GoBack, RecoveryGenius, Acronis OS Selector, Acronis TrueImage, SafeguardV4.2, OSL2000"

 

When I tried this (about a year ago) I found that after restoring a snapshot all subsequent snaphots (i.e., all those taken after the restored snapshot) were gone! ...is that still the case?

 

I've never liked it, too.

 

It is free at 'Giveaway of the Day' today
http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/restoreit-7/

 

Is anyone giving this a try? The GAOTD offer looks tempting.
My C drive has about 100 GB of space used. Does anyone have a guess how big the snapshot will be?

 

I haven't tried this particular software and won't...but I can say having used Farstone DriveClonePro and BackupRecovery Pro, the software is OK. I didn't like it enough to use it as my main tools, and their support (for me) has been inadequate. Nothing about it stood out. Let me know how it goes!

Thanks.

 

I used Comodo Time Machine for a while and it worked well enough, but I'm uneasy with programs that alter the MBR. The bottom line for all these programs is how do they handle a complete software or hard drive failure? Currently I create full images of the disk at regular intevals, and if necessary I can boot from a recovery CD and restore an image. This is more reliable then having snapshots on the primary drive. I'm curious about RestoreIT 7 though and hope some experienced users will comment.

Edit: There is a thorough review here...

http://www.softpedia.com/reviews/windows/RestoreIT-Pro-Review-47152.shtml

 

The issue I previously discussed (post #5 above), is a huge disadvantage (assuming that's how it still works)! As a Rollback Rx user, there have been many times that I would 'roll-back' to a prior snapshot to examine or recover something and afterwards 'roll-forward' to my current snapshot.

Free is nice, but imho Rollback Rx is a superior product.

Aaron

 

Someone on the "Giveaway" site stated that RestoreIT 7 does not have the ability to create and run from a bootable CD. In the event of a hard drive failure you must be able to boot from a CD. The program must also be able to save full snapshots to external media, such as a USB hard drive to use in conjunction with a boot CD. If it can do this then I would consider it a complete backup solution, and if it can't what's the point?

 

Instant System Restore (ISR) programs are not intended to be a complete backup solution (at least not yet)! They are quite useful as they provide a very fast means for restoring a prior system state (or individual files), but most of us who use an ISR also use a disk-imaging program for disaster recovery.

Aaron

 

That's fine as long as they can work together with a disk imaging program. I read somewhere though that ISRs don't. Can you make disk images in conjunction with Rollback RX? How about RestoreIT 7? And what about the matter of disk defragging? I seem to remember that I couldn't defrag when I was using CTM, which is probably why I eventually removed it.

 

Absolutely - and that's been discussed in numerous Wilders threads (also, see my sig below).

When using an ISR like RB (or CTM) there is absolutely no need for disk-defragging, or for that matter anything to be gained from disk-defragging ...it is important to perform a disk-defrag before installing RB, but once it's up and running regular use of RB's own snapshot-defragger is all that's needed.

Aaron

------
PS. If you feel compelled to do a disk-defrag you can always uninstall RB, run your disk-defrag, and then reinstall RB...

 

http://horizondatasys-forum.com/102-post5.html

 

True, but I say again, when running an RB-enabled system there is absolutely no need for disk-defragging (except before installing RB). Once RB is installed there's nothing to be gained by disk-defragging! ...regular use of RB's own snapshot-defragger is all that's needed - truly.

Besides which, does anyone think the procedure outlined above is simpler than uninstalling/reinstalling RB? That procedure still results in the loss of all RB snapshots (other than the current snapshot), so if you feel compelled to do a disk-defrag you might as well uninstall RB, run your system maintenance apps, including defragging, and then re-install RB (a safer approach imho).

Aaron

 

Minor comparisons between RestoreIT 7 and Rollback RX are expected, and likely appreciated. Hijacking the the thread to discuss what would best be done in a Rollback RX dedicated thread is messing up the thread.

I'm interested in whether a defrag is possible with RestoreIT 7. How to defrag in Rollback is way out there.

 

I use No Defragmentation with it.

 

Thank you, Mr. PC. Is that due to a defrag being unneccesary, or due to a defrag being hazardous to the RestorIT installation?

 

Not to answer for Mr. PC, but judging from the following Farstone FAQ it seems that using a disc defragger is a no-no (Norton SpeedDisk is a degragger):

 

Thank you. I'll keep that in mind.

 

Since RestorIT lacks a built-in Defrag Tool (i.e. like the one Rollback Rx has built-in),
I avoid using the Defrag Tool of Windows or any other 3rd party Defrag Tool.

 

As one who is 'on the verge' of buying an ISR program I don't see any RestoreIT features that are better than (or for that matter, even as good as) those of Rollback Rx.

 

FarStone RestoreIT 7 looks good and the amount of memory used by RitAspserver.exe 5055K, FsMain.exe 30.780K and Fsloader.exe 1.728 K would amount to 15MB,

Rescue Area assigned 5000 MB


Will test this product for a month and see how well it fares. But it doesn't look all too bad......