Help Needed using Drive Snapshot

Brian and Graham. Many thanks for your efforts. Asking too much I know, but like to know any programs limitations. I could never get ATI to restore from windows either, booting into Recovery Environ) and it advertises the fact that it can.

You know after reading all of the problems in other threads about imaging software in general, including the latest must have-up to date-super dooper stuff, I think I will be quite content with DS if it proves to be reliable on my system. The other stuff proggies just seem to have too may conflicts with.........something!
This little DS just seems to work. Does complement FDISR very well for me. All credit to the developers, and thanks for all the help here.

Ken

 

The disk-imaging program I first used was True Image. It worked very well for me (TI's restore operation is certainly far more user-friendly than DS). Unfortunately TI wasn't able to capture hidden (non-Windows) partitions, which DS can do. I needed that capability because I use Rollback Rx which creates its own proprietary partition to store its snapshots.

 

So,you you stopped using the fixmbr together with ATI as earlier in favour of DS...All snapshots recovered?

 

Not quite . It doesn't copy or move the data at all but it protects the sectors where the data is written so that it isn't deleted or overwritten by Windows.

If you are looking to save your snapshots in your DS images then you need to select the 'Maintenance Mode' box in advanced options. How big is the partition you are imaging and how much data is stored on it at the moment?

There are a couple of other tips that you might find useful if you are looking to do this.

Graham

 

There is also a new freeware Self Image http://selfimage.excelcia.org/ that could help you with this.

 

pandlouk,

Thanks for mentioning Self Image. It was new to me. I just tried it for the first time and created an image of a hidden partition. Unlike SnapShot it can create a compressed image of a hidden partition. SnapShot creates uncompressed images of hidden partitions. I didn't install Self Image. I ran it from the exe in the BartPE plugin folder.

On the negative side there is no image Verify function. The absence of Verify is a major concern to me. I haven't tried a restore from BartPE as I'm unlikely to use it again.

Still, it's a free imaging alternative that will run from BartPE. Along the lines of DriveImage XML.

 

See what you think after restoring from BartPE. A restore is just as easy as creating an image.

 

You are welcome.
Yes for the moment is a bit risky to rely only on Self Image. I am currently testing it and for the moment seems good. But the verify is a feature that all the imaging software should have.

 

Using DS' Maintenance Mode made a sector-by-sector (raw) image which captured and restored my entire c-partition with every Rollback Rx snapshot!

 

Right - I'm anxious to build a BartPE CD, which I will attempt to do this weekend.

 

Graham, from what I can see, everything seems to have restored ok. My system partition is 32GB with about 50% free. Any tips are always appreciated.

 

OK. Youve got a working image which is the main thing at this stage. Make a copy of that to DVD and/or some other external drive in case of hardware failure.

Some time ago, I found that restoring images with the 'free' space didn't, in itself, wipe the partition that it was restored to. That is, bits of previous RB installations could show up even after I restored an image. To overcome this, I always wipe/zero the partition before re-installing a 'full' DS image. I use Acronis Disk Director for this but there are lots of utilities out there that will do the same thing.

If you have just imaged and you have then restored this will most likely not be a problem but I do it now as a matter of course. If there is a chance that the MBR is different from that in your image then you need to get DS to restore the MBR as well which it doesn't do by default.

Say, for example that you have a DS image with RB installed and also one without it installed then you should restore the MBR when going from one to the other.

Final tip. As you're probably bored with hearing about by now, I do a restore at reboot with Rollback and so my system drive stays fairly static. DS' maintenance mode will store anything that is not filled with zeros but that includes areas that may have been written to at any time in the past and then deleted. So, I've found it to be quite helpful to wipe/zero the free space
so that DS backs up only what is necessary. The only problem is that, to do this, you have to uninstall Rollback first as no wiping utility will know where the RB data is stored.

It might seem like a pain but it doesn't take that long to do and it can make quite a difference to the size, and therefore speed, of the backup.

The free utility I use is here. For the system drive you need to check the box to not wipe the last 16K.

Once you've wiped the disk (all your files are left intact ) then you might like to defrag before reinstalling RB. Then reinstall and make another full image with DS. This may be substantially smaller than the first depending on how 'dirty' your drive was in the first place.

Or....you can just be happy that you've got a nice reliable, full backup and ignore this last tip for the time being .

Graham

 

Well, in that case can´t see so much gaining in compare with an ATI image made in win + restore from the ATI recovery disk+ fixmbr...And with a followed rollback reinstall...Provided you have a fresh image...

 

The purpose of the exercise is to clean the drive so that if you are saving all unused sectors as well then these (certainly under Drive Snapshot) will take up as little space as possible. I've got one setup with a 40GB partition and just under 10GB of that used which, even when saving all sectors, still only produces an image which is 4.5GB in size.

If you have a new installation to a brand new disk so that all the empty space really is empty, then there's no problem anyway. If, like me, you tend to bring drives into use from redundant machines then they could have data written all over them .

I don't know how ATI handles the unused sectors in an image but as long as it compresses all truly unused sectors down to almost nothing then it will be fine to use as well.

Graham

 

I recall that one restore(raw image) failed with paragon DB while others before that were made with success (rollback snapshots)...probably I forgot then to wipe the drive properly...OK, nice compressing in DS,better than Paragon it seems...Concerning ATI it skips unused sectors and makes only one-to-one sector automatically if sys.drive is´nt properly reckognized or something like that...

 

Sorry Graham, but your tips have left me confused about the reason/necessity for 'wiping' my system partition (which btw, is the only partition I image) before restoring the image. Also in that regard, do you use Acronis Disk Director and Disk Redactor for the same or different purpose?

I'm also confused about having to separately restore the MBR. I don't believe I did that, yet my system seemingly works as it should after making my first (and only) DS raw image and subsequent restore. Was this a stroke of luck?

 

Sorry, that'll be my garbled explanation .

OK. I found that, if I didn't wipe/zero the partition that RB was going to be restored to, then some of the previous installation could still show up. So, I always wipe the partition now if I am restoring a complete RB image. You may be fine not doing it but I would strongly recommend that you do.

Disk Director wipes the entire partition and is what I use before restoring an image. Disk Redactor only wipes the unused parts of the disk and is what I use before installing Rollback as it helps to keep the backup image small when using Drive Snapshot. This bit isn't essential at all but my 'tidy' gene insists that I do it .

No, not luck at all. There was no need to restore the MBR as it wouldn't have changed. If you were restoring an image with RB installed to a drive which hadn't previously had RB on it then yes, you would need to install the MBR from the RB image. In practice, it takes longer to decide whether to restore the MBR than it does to actually do it!

Graham

 

Gotcha... One final queston (you've heard that before!) - I have Acronis Disk Director 10, how do I use it to wipe the partition?

 

Boot it up with the CD. Select the partition you want to wipe, then select 'Delete'. In the pop-up menu you then have the option of wiping the partition one or more times. Once is ok. Make sure it what you really want to do and then hit the chequered flag .

Graham

 

Graham, that operation sounds like it's deleting the partition, not wiping it (entering zeros).

 

Yes, it's exactly like deleting the partition but it also wipes it by writing zeros to the whole partition.

I'm sorry, I did leave out one vital instruction, you also need to create the partition with Disk Director again after deleting it.

Graham

 

Excellent thread and topic exchanges. Myself this makes me feel like a new student and in part am where concerns DriveSnapshot. Amazing program indeed and with a little extra study on it's settings/ability and your courage to go about creating then restoring a few times, it's definitely a boost for confidence. Keep up the great discussions. Many of us are learning the benefits of what this program is capable of and relieving a lot of doubts thanks to your answers. LoL

 

Although I have Acronis Disk Director Suite, I would like to keep the image-restore process relatively straight-forward, so I'm wondering if this is really necessary. Have you encountered problems when you didn't delete/wipe the partition (because of Rollback Rx)? I was under the impression that when you do an image-restore (especially when restoring a sector-by-sector image) it overwrites the entire partition - is that not so?

 

It's certainly not the case in my experience but I can't speak for other software. As long as you've got a normal backup that works then you can always try it out and see how you get on .

Graham

 

I think we're all still on that learning curve.....see below .

I feel I keep apologising in this thread . You got me thinking about this again and after doing another sector restore where it was clear that DS was writing back even the empty sectors, I agreed with you that, logically, there shouldn't be any need for the wipe in this case.

So I created two images, one with 3 snapshots in and the second with the original 3 plus another 6. They were only minor changes, just enough to tell them apart. I then restored each of them in turn a few times and each had the correct snapshots and each booted into its own snapshots correctly .

I think I've been doing the wiping needlessly for some time so thank you for saving me from that little task! I did the original tests about six months ago and it may have been that I had issues when restoring a non-sector image over a previous installation. I think for that, it might still be worth wiping but the complete copy, as you say, shouldn't need it.

Out of interest, I also created a differential of the 3 snapshot to the 3+6 snapshot using the all-sectors mode. It took as long to create the differential as it would have done the full image BUT the image file was 70MB as opposed to 2.4GB for the full image. Oh, and it restored perfectly .

Graham