Introducing AX64 Time Machine - hybrid imaging/snapshot software

Here is a little suggestion to improve the program coming from somebody who knows next to nothing about the technical aspects of the program.
I just installed the program and have not actually tried to restore. I'm going to get on that a little later today. I did try to see how much the program costs and how I can pay for it.
I opened the program, clicked on register now/ Purchase a copy and I got
Hmm cannot find page, sorry!
So I figured OK, if I go to the home page, there should be a link to the registration/purchasing page but I could not find one.
Obviously a very easy thing to fix for you wizards. A minor detail but important nevertheless.
Anyway, if the program works on my XP (yes I'm old school) laptop I'm most likely going to want to buy it. I hear there is even a discount to be had for members of this forum, is that right?
So that's a fix I could suggest.
I have three computers at my house ( all old and all XP buy they work for me) would I have to buy three separate licenses?

 

Hey man,

you are mighty impatient...
Isso added the licensing feature only about a week ago:
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showpost.php?p=2222080&postcount=1075

The final production version will probably be out sometime next week, until then you won't be able to buy it...


Anyways, good to see you here. Lots of knowledgable and helpful people here who can probably answer your questions much better than I can...



Cheers
manolito

 

I have tested my recovery media CD in XP and it takes me to the recovery console . Everything seems to be OK but....
I ended up booting back into XP and to see if I could restore the system back to where it was an hour ago. I selected the backup clicked restore and now I have been staring at the restore screen with the status indicator at 0.0% complete for the last 30 minutes. That really sucks!
I wish there were instructions, help files etc to let you know what to expect. I'm going to have to hit alt control and delete and pray that my computer hasn't been messed up.
At this point I will not retry a restore because I don't want to do any damage to my system. If my laptop survives restore attempt this I will reinstall Sysrestore because I know it works.
I'm hoping someone here can tell me what might have happened with Time Machine and why I was not able to do a restore from within windows. Until then I'll leave it alone.

 

I'm back and here's an update. My Laptop took forever to shut itself down after I manually shut down AX64 with the taskmanager, but it started back up and everything seems back to normal.
I was going to reinstall sysrestore but the program warned me about possible incompatibilities with other backup software. So I'm going to ask my friend manolito about this. I might have to uninstall AX64 and then reinstall Sysrestore and Acronis as well.
Too bad, I was hoping this Time Machine would be a great and simple backup solution.

 

I have no idea what is happening on your system, but don't give up yet...

First of all you need to collect the logs and email them to Isso. In the main AXTM window click on the upper left position of the title bar, click on "About AX64 Time Machine" and click on "Collect Logs". The logs will be saved as a zip file which you can send to "info@ax64.com"

I suppose you still have an Acronis image stored on your external HDD. You should update this image (incremental backup) using your Acronis Rescue CD. This is just an additional safety layer.

Then you could try to boot from your AX64 Time Machine Recovery CD and do a restore from there. It will take much longer than from within Windows, but this will be the equivalent of fully restoring an image based backup (like made by Acronis True Image).


Cheers
manolito

 

Hey my friend,
I just sent the log files to Isso but unfortunately I have deleted my acronis backup already. I didn't have enough room on the external drive for two separate full backups. So I had to let the acronis one go. At this point I'm hesitant to restore from the recovery CD because I just don't trust the program and I really don't want to be a guinea pig for a buggy program. Unless Isso has an answer like "this is what happened".... I'll probably reinstall Sysrestore ( which has worked for me) and Acronis. I wish I had left them on my system but you mentioned that only Acronis 2013 was compatible with AX64 (mine is 2011) and I didn't want any conflicts so I uninstalled both programs before I installed AX 64.
Another thing I noticed was that during the next hourly backup (while I was writing you the e-mail) I was barely able to type. I just can't have my computer slow down like that every hour for who knows how long. Check out the last sentence on my e-mail to you. Every other letter would be skipped and the backup was only at 4% after about 10 minutes. So again, I shut that down too. No point in doing a backup I may not be able to recover.
Maybe Isso will find out what happened by reading the log file maybe it's even something I did or didn't do but I'm definitely not impressed with the program so far. I also wish there was a manual, something more than just the startup tips.
So that's it for now.
I'll keep you posted.

 

Thank you, Isso.

Please let me know if you need further information.

Also, the word "backup" is not shown in full

 

That,s good idea but why free. It can be kept a paid product though a bit cheaper price-wise.

 

Your interface seems completely off compared to mine here and we're running the same version. Did you change the default font of Windows? Even the graphics on your snapshot are off. Everything is well aligned on my interface, but not on yours.

 

Echo the same here with identical o/s specs. We have something revolutionary emerging here with this app, and it's still in beta atm. Yea there might be other somewhat similar proggys about with some seniority but being from Kentucky's Derby town, it comes as no surprise for fielded Champions to rise quickly to the limelight of the best and prove their metal for the long term.
This app is proving a marvel of engenious innovation and it's still very early in the game yet.

Regards Easter

 

Look at my GUI compared to yours. And that's under both Win 7 and Win 8. Looks how the graphics are aligned and connect together. Notice the window title being centered while your is left aligned. Something isn't right.

 

Thanks for the reply.

Guess I am not alone, see the attached images in this post. The word "Backup" is also not in full.

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showpost.php?p=2225322&postcount=1318

 

+1

you are right when the task started already, when i restored a snapshot, it hangs at 60% for a while, but i saw my HDD led blinking so i supposed it was doing its job, and then my system rebooted and the restore was properly done.

But on the "issue" i observed with WSA is that AXTM hanged at 0%, my system froze (mouse pointer, etc...), my HDD led shown no activity. I had to do a hard shutdown, deactivate WSA and launch the restore, then the case above happened.

It may be my tight setting of WSA that may interfere with AXTM procedure; i will investigate about it.

 

Hi Isso,

I've continued trying to get the Recovery Media to work under XP without success. I've reverted to a Macrium image pre-AX64 install again and create Recovery Media but still no luck.

Can I install AX64 on a Win7 machine just to create the Recovery Media and try booting up from it on XP?

 

the 2 issues i mentioned earlier didn't happen anymore, does AXTM is a auto-learning-polymorphic- software?

ah also, it will be nice, if we could delete intermediary snapshots; example:

i have :

- Snapshot F (made from B)
- Snapshot E (Made from D)
- Snapshot D (made from C)
- Snapshot C (made from B)
- Snapshot B (made from A)
- Snapshot A (made from Baseline)
- Baseline

i want delete C but keep D, E and F; actually if i want delete C, i must delete D and E...

 

Hi Isso,

1) When GUI not in focus "about icon" turns white, icon missing
http://i40.tinypic.com/2zp5wk7.jpg

2) Clipping occurs from edges while expanding GUI
http://i44.tinypic.com/sg4uw0.jpg

Also one thing that can be annoying, when selecting a backup, popup description that follows, time/description/size,
Can you consider embedding it into GUI instead?

I say that hence if I click a backup and then select something else outside GUI that popup delays in my desktop workarea.
It's somewhat peculiar that you can drag this popup around your desktop.
---
Windows8 x64

 

Atonomega, if you create the recovery media under W7, it should run fine on the hardware that you want to restore XP on. There may be some issues with drivers (special drivers that exist only for the old XP hardware that aren't in the W7 WinRE build) but most likely it'll work just fine.

Although your XP hardware will be running a W7-based recovery media, you WILL be recovering an XP image on that hardware when you do the restore. If the hardware (drivers) for the XP hardware are just "old" and not special (Intel RST, for example), the recovery should work just fine.

I've used a W7 recovery media for both my W7 system (old crappy Core2Quad Gateway) for W7 recoveries, an HP DV9000 series lappy running W7 & XPsp3 and a really old Averatec 7100-series lappy running XPsp3. All recoveries have run just fine.

 

Hi Fad,

Great idea, thank you. I didn't know about such possibility. When I create a forum/FAQ on our site I'll include this option.

Isso

 

Isso,

It might be quite informative if you could compare the iso-file builds (and msinfo32.exe) from the 'RST' machines you refer to above with the same files that I sent you (7 weeks ago).

I guess it's true that 'misery loves company' because I felt somewhat vindicated to read that The Shadow and Wendi are also reporting 'RST' drivers missing from their recovery media (and as a consequence their hard drive is not found)!

However, other than my not being able to prove (to myself) that AX64 can successfully perform a 'bare metal' restore, I can report that all other aspects of the current beta-build are performing perfectly.

Cruise

___
Ps. I thought I posted this late yesterday but it seems to have 'disappeared', so if it's a dup. please forgive me.

 

Hi David,

Sorry to hear about that problem. Frankly I'm not sure what could cause the "stuck at shutdown", but Windows is known to freeze at boot logo screen if it was previously forcefully shutdown. To fix that you just need to boot into any recovery media and run checkdisk on the system drive - after that the OS will boot.

For 'Build Recovery Screen' - sorry, I'm not sure that I understand, which screen is do you mean?

For cancel button - we'll add it. For now you can just close the program - it'll cancel the process.

For MBR - yes, you need to make the selection before the operation is started.

Isso

 

Hi,

I installed AX64 Time Machine on my HTPC (Windows 8 Pro 64 bit) and I really like it.

I made several backups and was able to restore them.

The only (very minor) bug I could found was that pictures with an extension in uppercase (my camera stores them as *.JPG instead of *.jpg) don't display a thumbnail in the backup browser, which I already had contact with Isso about.

I also was able to add the recovery ISO to my multiboot USB (with the help of SARDU, which is similar to YUMI) and it boots successfully.

 

Panagiotis,

Good to see you, welcome back! Thank you very much for the information.
For VSS and exclusion - we used it at some point, but then discovered, that it results in some very rare and difficult to find file corruptions. One of the examples of what was happening was the following:

Windows would download the new updates into SoftwareDistribution folder (this folder is excluded in VSS by default). Meanwhile we take a backup. Then Windows installs those updates, the trick is it often doesn't move files, but instead just creates hard links. As a result the clusters that those files occupy don't get into the incremental backup, so after restore some of those files get corrupted.

Thus we disabled excluded file processing in AXTM for now, until we can find a workaround to that problem.

Isso

 

Panagiotis is as always an endless source of wisdom

Isso

 

Hi mrfargoreed,

Great to hear it, it means our recent Win 8 fixes work. Thank you!

Isso

 

Hi gimmeagig,

Sorry to hear about this problem. I replied via email. Basically I'm thinking that this is some type of compatibility problem. However there is too little information to figure out the cause at this moment. If we find the cause for this (or similar) issue I'll let you know.

For help file - yes we'll be creating it, thank you. However I'm sure that you did everything correctly, so it's not any kind of misuse-related issue.

Isso