Introducing AX64 Time Machine - hybrid imaging/snapshot software

I am relatively new to Wilders and especially new to this thread. I came as a result of being one of the fortunate ones to get a free license for Shadow Defender. I installed it literally 2 days ago and am learning some about it.

In the mean time, I began reading this thread. I am intriqued, to say the least. I had not heard of this software until coming to this thread.

I am beginning to think that I may actually be more interested in AX64 than I am in SD. Some background: I used to be a utility-junkie. Now, I pretty much rely on an AV, a solid firewall (behind a hardware router firewall), and Sandboxie (paid). I also am a back-up fanatic. I back up my system in 3 different ways; online, file backup to external HD, and image backups to external HD.

But, I've been looking for a tool to use for software testing and making quick backups before making major system changes (i.e. windows updates, updating programs like my AV & Sandboxie, major deleting sprees, testing different browsers, etc.) I thought SD would be the solution. Now, I'm not so sure.

I see some of you are still using SD and AX64 together. I'm wondering if you could explain briefly why you use both together and for what purposes you are using them? I'm trying to differentiate between SD and AX64 and decide which is better for me and the purposes I have in mind.

(I should note that at this point, I don't intend on using SD all the time. Personally, I don't see the need since most everything I do online, I do using Sandboxie. But, like I said, I've only been using it for 2 days.....)

P.S. I use Windows 7-64 bit.

 

Hi Alex, I'd heard that Shadow Defender couldn't be used with AX64, that there was some sort of conflict or incompatibility.

 

bgoodman,

Thank you for mentioning this, I would just clarify that I can do nothing about it, because the crash happens in SD driver (diskpt.sys). If you already sent the dump to SD support, they have a very good chance to fix this issue.

Isso

 

Dear Mohamed,

Frankly I don't remember mentioning two to four years, anyway I'll see if we can switch to a longer update period - it just depends on a number of factors.

Isso

 

bgoodman,

Thank you for your advice and recommendation, I'm really happy to read it!
Baldrick, Easter, Froggie - thank you for your positive posts and for your great help!

Isso

 

Hi Alex,

If you are using AX64 and SD together, make sure not to exclude any files or folders in SD, otherwise AX64 backups may become corrupted.

Whether to use one or the other depends on your usage scenario:
If you just need to quickly undo some unwanted changes then both of the programs would do. But if you need to save multiple system states (i.e. points in time) and switch between them - then AX64 is the choice.

Isso

 

I suspect that some are using them together because they feel comfortable with the specific protection SD offers due to familiarity. I was unhappy at first to learn of the problems between the 2 and decided to simply live with the (to me at the time) minor inconveniences of having/using using both. I thought that for situations that I was very uncomfortable I would use SD and the rest of the time I would use AX64. After using AX64 for a few months I realized that SD offered very little that AX64 did not (nothing in fact IMO) so I saw no reason to keep it on my PC.

Below are a few thoughts on some of the specific differences between the 2 programs.

At the base the 2 programs are designed for almost completely different jobs. One is a virtualization program and the other is an imaging/snapshot program. There is some minor overlap in ability and functionality but they really are quite different.

When you enter Shadow Mode with SD any changes to the PC will be reversed when you exit it. You can exclude certain changes, like file downloads etc, from being lost, but for the most part anything you did while in Shadow Mode will be gone when you reboot.

AX64 will enable you to maintain a record of all changes to the PC as its being used. If you need to recover something, either a particular file or the entire system, you can do so at any time as long as the snapshots containing the file or system state has not been merged into other snapshots. It is possible, using various strategies, to keep as many snaps as you wish literally for ever but for most doing this will not be especially productive.

SD will in no way protect you from hardware failure while AX64 will. Both can protect against data & system corruption, viruses and messed up updates, but, for example, if you are in Shadow Mode when doing an update, or testing a program, and you wish to keep the update or program,, you will have to get out of SM and then redo whatever it was that you had done. With AX64, if everything went well, you would simply leave things alone and proceed as normal.

Another major difference us that with AX64 you are protected always (assuming auto snap is enabled). With SD you have to know in advance that you might be running into a problem and then launch SD and enter SM. With (again for example) data corruption or auto updates, you will not likely know in advance that a problem is immanent and so protection will not be available to help you recover from the problem. Further more, if somehow malware made it onto the system (say from a contaminated usb drive) when SD was not running you will not be able to easily recover from the problem. With Ax64 doing so in all of these situations would be quite simple.

Another and seldom mentioned benefit of AX64 is that it can enable you, to some extent, to have access to versions of particular files. Since AX64 will take and to some extent maintain snaps, if 2 days ago you created a file and then today modified it, then decided for some reason you would like to access the original again, you can easily do so. With SD this is not at all possible.

I hope this brief and incomplete list is helpful.

Oh yes, I too am running Win 7 64 bit.

 

Thank you very, very much bgoodman4. That was an extremely helpful answer! Very succinct, yet comprehensive; and pretty impressive!

To be honest with you, I'm kind of a freeware junkie. I love freeware. The only 2 commercial utility programs (vs. something like MS Office) that I've actually paid for over the past several years are WinPatrol and Sandboxie. However, I'm thinking very seriously about downloading the free trial of AX64 and giving it a try and maybe even buying it.

Thank you again.

 

Good on you...seeing is believing. AXTM has replaced both RB Rx and Acronis TI on my system. And as they say about the 'Golden Arches'..."I'm loving it"

 

Hi BG, Reading your post above where you say "as the snapshots containing the file or system state has not been merged into other snapshots", are you saying that you can't restore to a snapshot that has been merged?

 

You are very welcome, glad to be of assistance.

 

If you want to restore a particular snap that has been merged with another snap you are out of luck as it no longer exists.

You may recall my problem with recovering a corrupted spreadsheet file a while back. My PC had been off for a few days (3 or so) as I was out of town and when I got back and tried to open the file it would not open. No problem I thought, I would just open the file from the snap that had been created an hour or 2 previous to my creation of the now corrupted file. Unfortunately AX64 had merged the hourly snaps into daily ones and the particular file was no longer available in the state I was looking for. Older states were available, and newer (the corrupted one), but not the one I wanted.

PS: I have addressed this problem for critical files by using a program called 12 Ghost Backup. It has a feature called hyperbackup which will save versions of monitored files.

 

So I've got an external hard drive and I've been testing Ax64 and it's pretty good. I've only had one problem. I tried the recovery media and I tried to restore from the cd but it didn't work. It didn't seem like I was able to restore back to my C drive and only offered to restore my computer to the D drive which isn't very helpful. I'm guessing I did something wrong?

 

It seems to me that others have mentioned that for some reason AX64, may, in its interface only, misname the drive being restored to but if you let the process go to completion things will be correct at the end. Best to let Isso or someone more familiar with this issue comment here but I do think it may be (or have been) a known bug. Which version of AX64 are you using and if you have been upgrading the program as new releases have become available, have you also updated your recovery disk? Some of the new versions do require you to make new recovery disks but if you are not on the e-mail list you may not be getting this particular bit of info.

I have done a number of restores from recovery media and have not noticed this as once I select the snap I want to restore to I simply hit go and wait until the process is completed. AX64 has never failed to restore my PC correctly.

 

When I finished the restore and rebooted it went to an empty screen and wouldn't boot up. This happened a few times. Eventually I removed the cd and switched off my pc, when I switched it back on again it booted up normally. Not sure what happened but nothing suggests that a restore was completed.

 

I uninstalled this recently as I had a lot of changes to make to my pc. Added a 2nd internal HDD and new PSU. Move files around etc and thought I'd use the new internal HDD for backups. I was using an external before which worked fine and thought this would be a quicker option.

After installing again I've run into a problem which I've been troubleshooting for days now
As I try to start the first backup the RAM quickly rises to 99%. Same when I open the AX browser.
So no backup can be made and I have to try and shut down AX.

I have checked all security and allowed it all to run. Tried uninstalling everything I can think may interfere with the backup task. Reset Windows services, checked updates etc. Still can't fix it.

Thought I'd ask here before submitting a question through the site. Only thing that stands out to me in the log, (there isn't much as backup doesn't work) is the last line with the error code.
[2064:2116:0725/144149:WARNING:AXCommonStuff.cpp(118]StartProcessAsStandardUser->CreateProcessWithTokenW failed, error 1058

Anyone else had 99% off the RAM used and no backups? I can't figure it out. Hoped someone would recognize the error.
W7 64bit, 8GB Ram
Thanks

 

Wow, this was a fantastic post!! I'll use it as a basis for my next "How AX64 compares to..." article if you don't mind.

Isso

 

merisi,

The program is trying to restore the correct drive. The problem is that when you boot into Recovery Environment the drive letters may not be the same as in your original OS. This is Windows-related issue that I'm not sure how to overcome.
You can assume that if you see the restore dialog - then the program has found the original (correct) drive to restore. So just ignore the drive letter.
If the program doesn't find the original drive it will tell you so, and will offer to select a disk (rather than a drive) to restore to.

Isso

 

Hi merisi,

Did the restore operation start and progressed normally till 100%? At which point of time did you see the empty screen and what color was it? Any text on it? Thank you.

Isso

PS - you might want to open a ticket for this - please visit www.ax64.com and click the Feedback & Support button in the top left corner.

 

No problem Isso, I am glad to be of assistance.

 

Hi Fingol,

Sorry about this problem, please create a ticket and I'll try to solve it. Was the program working properly for you before?

Isso

 

Hi Isso,

The process finished and went to 100% and then restarted. After that it wouldn't boot up until I removed the cd and my external hard drive. Did the restore complete? To be honest the more I read about Ax64 and the overall ease of use, I think it's the program I've needed for a long time. If I'd had it a year ago it would have saved me an awful lot of time.

 

This is the only fault I found about AXTM: merging the backups does not provide a backup "specific file".
To this day, I still use, in parallel AXTM and unfortunately, AUTOVER (versioning real-time) and EASEUS TODO BACKUP (daily incremental backup).

 

Thanks Isso. Yes it worked before so I've prob done something stupid
I went back to using the external drive to test and had the same problem.
I might have a quick try with the previous version.

 

So, did the restore complete? You should be able to tell if things were brought back to the state you reverted to. If you were just testing the recovery process you might want to create a folder on the desktop after you create the snap you will be reverting to. After the revert the folder should be gone and if it is you will know the process worked.

Keep in mind that if you leave the CD in the drive during the reboot Windows will go to the CD/recovery interface. Thats the way the bios has been set up. If it had not been then the boot process would bypass the CD and go straight into Win and you would not have been able to get into the recovery interface.

Isso, perhaps you can add an ejection of the CD as part of the process so Win does not launch the recovery interface upon reboot. I had to deal with this some time ago but cannot remember if it happens each time I restore from the CD.