If Drive Cloner and RollBack Rx work-----

Now getting back on topic...

As one who believes his system was hosed by RB, I would not consider going back even if DC worked perfectly and seamlessly with RB. My huge disappointment at the time was that their support was of no help whatsoever.

Shadow Defender has since taken RB's place on my laptop, but even without SD I would just increase the frequency of my image-backups.

Cruise

 

Yo'mamalito can watch the one and only monolito do the mabolito with manalito!

 

Hi Pete,

Yes (thank goodness)! But it was 5-days old and that meant lots of work re-creating my recent entries. So I first contacted HDS Support who made me submit a work-ticket and wait for my turn in the queue. Well I couldn't afford to let days go by without a solution, so I attempted to recover my system using Windows 7 recovery. That failed, so finally I restored my image backup, which succeeded.

Cruise

 

Pete, one of the problems with Rx is that it works very well until it doesn't. I would not trust the regular testing process since even modest changes to Win (as in updates) etc, can and will cause it to fail. And as we have seen HDS is not much help when this occurs.

 

I've given that a lot of thought. At the time I was using RB, I (foolishly) believed HDS' marketing hype - i.e., RB could bail me out of any misfortune and therefore I was not running a real-time AV. So I'm guessing that my system got infected in a way (like a rootkit?) that even hosed RB.

 

Hello everyone my name is Shane and I work at HDS, I am sorry that you guys have had bad experiences with RRX. We have changed a few things around but more importantly I am here to answer any questions you guys might have.

 

Hi Shane! As a long time PREVIOUS RBrx user, I would love to hear exactly what's been "changed" along the way.

 

Well clearly the marketing hype and falsehoods have not changed. The following is from the RollBack Rx home page

Nuff said?

 

I don't use Rollback but my friend (the exact customer Horizon caters for) had exactly the same issue like others have said (damaged mbr and corrupt / non usable snapshots etc) which again it was advertised to this type of customer, who wouldn't have a clue what an mbr is or how to fix it.

Of course people should educate themselves about drive imaging and overall backing up their data but when companies like Horizon false advertises their software in such disgusting ways then its no surprise that customers think they are protected.

 

I have ... but have decided to wait for the RTM, just too many li'l issues at the moment during the PREVIEW phase.

 

Well they don't actually say that RB is the sole solution for achieving that IT goal. The implication of that quote won't be much of a 'stretch' when deploying RB together with the forthcoming DC6.

pv

 

I don't doubt that your friend experienced a serious system issue, but since he "wouldn't have a clue what an mbr is or how to fix it" I can't help but wonder how he determined that his mbr was damaged?

 

Pete, would you please elaborate some on this statement?

 

Ahhhhhh... another happy Windows user, kinda like what happened when W8 (and/or VISTA) was released

 

When you start that way (no RAW), both your hands and your feet are tied behind your back

Not to belabor this point but RAW imaging is really the only way to deal with RBrx at this point, otherwise lots of MBR manipulation will be required. And on your system, Pete, that would be almost impossible with that 1tB SYSTEM (c:\) partition. Even if you spent the time (and $) to baseline that huge partition in the RAW mode, any incremental processing of that baseline would require the reading of the entire 1tB partition all over again to get the differences you're looking for. Anything outside of the managed Windows area cannot be seen, structure-wise, so the imaging operation needs to look at everything... over and over for each INCREMENTAL/DIFFERENTIAL. On your system that would most probably be a no-can-do ('cept maybe as an overnight operation).

When HOT imaging that RBrx protected system, there is really no way to get back even to your CURRENT SYSTEM STATE without MBR manipulation. During the days of v9.1 it was possible but since v10.X that ability has gone away without MBR manipulation. This will happen with every non-HDS HOT imaging system 'cept for those that have the ability to rewrite a standard Windows MBR upon restoration, not the imaged one (IFW can do it... haven't looked at a lot of others).

During our brief testing of the recently delivered Drive Cloner v6 from HDS, at least this imager seems to know where the last used disk block (by either Windows or RBrx) is located, and as a result, produces HOT images that are made up of only the CURRENT SYSTEM STATE and Rollback's hidden snapshots... not a bad start. BUT, its ability to INCREMENTALize its baselines doesn't appear to be in place yet, or if it is, it clearly doesn't work

Motto: a 1tB 10% utilized SYSTEM partition is a terrible thing to waste (when it comes to RAW imaging time)

 

Pete, as I see it (from the balcony), the main reason RB is not for you is because of your extremely large C-drive. That makes Raw images very time and space consuming. However, I can tell you that 'pain' will be alleviated somwhat with DC6.

In any case, I don't mean to 'sell'you on RB, I just wanted to understand that last statement you made about having to protect it.

 

RB v10.2 shields the MBR (from what a hot backup image is able to see/capture) in ways we do not yet understand.