First impressions

Just purchased True Image after a small go at the trial version, got TI to replace Drive Image which whilst worked, took a long time to load and even longer time to configure itself when booting from a CD.

Also felt TI would have an advantage by doing incremental restores, I normally do a complete image every week.

So tested version 771 out and seems to be fine, quicker that Drive Image took about 12 minutes to back up 10 gigs

Only issue was loading the 771 update over the original resulted in an error message about RPC so unloaded and reloaded the update, created the secure zone and everything was fine.

My only concern now is if the self management of SZ works, in the manner of maintaing the file size by deleting redundant files....

 

It just so happens that I had the occasion to find out today if this works too; it didn't for me. When I tried to create an incremental image (TI 8.0 build 771) in my Secure Zone, it failed because it said there wasn't enough space and that it gave me the option of increasing the size of the Secure Zone.

It was my understanding that once the SZ was filled, further images would overwrite the oldest incremental image, etc. I ended up removing the SZ, recreating it and doing a full image backup to begin again.

 

Thanks for that even though it is not good news, as my backups are unattended this is not what I wanted to read.

Although since starting this message I tried to fill SZ by doing full images and I couldn't, it did keep removing the previous images to allow space for the latest so maybe just a quirk with yours

 

Never tried SZ, but if it is based upon incremental updates I would not be suprised if it was not possible to have the 'sliding window' you are after, since (as I understand it) all incrementals are records of changes since the last incremental and eventually of the base image. If you delete the base image you are screwed.

The usual hack to get around this (in the non SZ mode) suggested by others in this forum, is to schedule (say) daily incrementals and also schedule a full image periodically.

For example I schedule daily incrementals of a partition in four separate subdirectories. I also schedule a full image in each one on the 1st,8th,15th and 22nd of the month. These overwrite the previous main image from a month before. All outstanding imcrementals at that time are orphaned and redundant, and will eventually be overwritten by the incrementals.

In this way it is possible to have a sliding window of daily backups over the previous month. Other variations are of course possible.

 

That sounds good but I've gone back to what I did with Drive Image, a full image every Friday evening, it only takes about 10 minutes and I can do other things.

 

Guess you misread what I wrote, eh? http://www.the-highway.com/Smileys/scratchchin.gif What I wrote was that I tried creating an incremental backup to the SZ where I already had a Full and 5 Incremental images. In this case, the incremental backup image did not force a deletion of any of the existent image files and consequently the creation of the new incremental image was not allowed. Apparently, creating a FULL backup image will overwrite a previous FULL backup image and thus the size of the SZ is maintained.

 

Okay gottya now

 

djmorgan,

Perhaps you or someone can help me understand something about this Security Zone because it's possible I'm contused! hehe

I decided to try making a FULL backup image when I already had a full and one incremental image there. I was under the impression that IF you created a FULL image, that would remove all existing backup image files and thus you could easily start over, right? But after creating the full backup image I then tried to Explore it and it said that there was no image in the Security Zone, even though the used space indicated that there were some files there. http://www.the-highway.com/Smileys/hairout.gif

So, I ended up removing the SZ, recreating it again and doing another full backup image. Egad..... !!

Thanks for any help in explaining exactly how this SZ is supposed to work.

 

WOW I'm probably not the right person to ask as I have only had TI for less than a week However, I have done what you did and it worked as advertised, I had a full back up and 3 incrementals then did another full back up and when I checked the sz only contained the last full back up and the size was correct for that back up.

What happened with yours I can't begin to understand, I have not seen a corrupt file yet

Why I think sz is clever is that enables you to re load partitions from the boot process without the need to use a boot disk using F11 which does work for me.

I don't particularly like the fact that sz cannot be seen by explorer but understand this is possibly good security.

Try what you did again and see if you get the same results.

 

Actually you CAN view and even extract files from the backup images in the Security Zone by using the "Explore Image" feature found in the TI main GUI. I've done this countless times.

I've been a very happy user of TI since the first release of version 6.0 and remain happy with the product and company. But it would be great to find out if my experience this time is a fluke or if anyone else has had the same/similar experience. And, it would be nice to confirm that my understanding of how the SZ and its resident files work. http://www.the-highway.com/Smileys/grin.gif

 

I know.......... that's why I used the word 'explorer'

 

I have just downloaded TI today and testing, so far it's good. My first test was with a laptop, external drive via PCMCIA USB 2. Ghost failed that one- not TI.
It is to bad TI doesn't use differential in place of incremental. That would take up less space in the TZ as you would always just have the base backup and one diff file. Is it possible to resize partitions with TI as it must be doing the same thing by creating a TZ?