Imaging or Back up.

Hey all,
I had a quick question for you guru's. I'm thinking of using some sort of backup. With Rollback RX can you save the images that are saved and back it up to a external HD? Should I even bother or just get something like shadow protect and back up that way?

 

Greetings!

Rollback is neither an imaging or a "backup" tool... it's an ISR application. As such it has no images to save. It uses fancy disk sector redirection managed by a dynamic database and a very special disk driver to do what it does.

The only way to successfully capture a Rollback-enabled system and all its "snapshots" is by COLD imaging (offline operation using a WinPE, BartPE, LINUX or DOS CD) with almost any imager that can do ALL SECTOR imaging (also called RAW... it's the whole disk incl. USED an unUSED disk sectors), or HOT imaging with the only tool found so far that can do such... "Image For Windows." (and even that requires a very special installation to do this).

Unless you need the "instant system restore" features of Rollback, just find yourself a good HOT/COLD imaging tool with the capability of both INCREMENTAL and/or DIFFERENTIAL options. There are many, many threads discussing such on this forum... both PAID and FREE choices.

 

Agree with the above comments. There are TONS of paid and free disk imaging tools you might want to look at if Rollback RX isn't going to meet your needs. Some good "cold" imagers I can recommend are:

1. IFL (Image for Linux)
2. DriveSnapshot on a WinPE CD
3. ShadowProtect
4. Farstone Total Recovery Pro 7
5. Macrium (paid version with WinPE)

#'s 1 and 2 you can get a trial and use the offline capabilites...

Let us know what you decide or need more help. It can get confusing with so many choices, and many people are passionate about one or more of them.

 

BACKUP IS NOT AN OPTION IMHO!

2 kinds:

1) Image backup
2) File/document backup

The one that has saved my PC life more than once is image so I can restore to a working version of my c drive/partition. The problem then is IF user has all his data in the C drive he wipes it and now has OLD data, email etc

So I keep all my programs windows and all 3rd party in the C drive AND I have 2 other partitions. One D: for data and one P for music and photos.

Thus I can restore my C drive (bad software or update) AND all my data is current.

I do this via the Paragon software which now has it's own forums here.

 

Yeah I wish I could partition off a section of my HD. Its only a 75 GB with 25 left over. Not much room to play with. I was thinking about getting a larger drive though. It would be a better option rather than plugging in an external drive all the time.

 

kjdemuth,

I hope you aren't considering putting the backup on the same HD as the source. If the HD fails you lose everything. Stick with the backup on the external HD.

 

I use and highly recommend Image for Windows.

 

Yes, I deliberatly left out the fact that I backup my partitions to an external drive. The partitions stuff is complex and does have a learning curve.

If you backup to same HD well.... you guys can finish the sentence.

It is possible as well to rotate external drives so one can be OFFSITE!

 

I use Image for Windows to do images of my system and use SyncBack too to backup user files fast and often during the day.

 

Thanks for the advice folks. I think I'm going to try shadow protect. I had rollback RX before but that is on the same disk so if it gets corrupt or deleted, all is lost. Shadow protect should fit the bill. The only other thing is ATI. 2012 version seems like it has a lot of options.

 

You certainly can't go wrong with ShawdowProtect...excellent product and on par with IFW/IFL/IFD...their HIR option is one of the best out there. Pricey, but great. Let us know how it goes! Also, in my opinion, Acronis doesn't even live on the same planet as SP.

 

Rollback creates snapshots, so why couldn't you use SP for back ups to your external HD as well, for insurance if Rollback has a problem.