Need to Settle Imaging Situation

Discussion in 'backup, imaging & disk mgmt' started by n8chavez, Sep 19, 2009.

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  1. n8chavez

    n8chavez Registered Member

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    I bought ShadowProtect, and I like it very much, but I also like Drive Snapshot very much. My question is: which one should I use?

    All hardware will eventually die. That's inevitable. It seems the ability to do bare metal restore is the only advantage of ShadowProtect over Drive Snapshot. Is that a big of a deal as everyone is making it out to be? The only thing I can see that needs a driver in order for the system to boot is a harddisk driver, and maybe board drivers. Can't those be installed automatically by doing a repair install after restoring the image to new hardware?

    I like Drive Snapshot, for the reason's Ive said in many threads here. Of particular importance is its portability; it's one 250k file versus and install-required program. Also DS allows me to use command lines and bat files. I can make an image of my drive it two clicks by utilizing the drive context menu.

    The situation is this: I have licenses for both DS and SP. But my father also needs an imaging app (just to be on the safe side) for his work system. He uses that laptop all day every day, so it's very important that the data there is completely safe. ShadowProtect's says that licenses are per user, meaning that I cannot ethically use it on my system. I do not want to purchase another app because I have these two. I am planning on buying a brand new system in the next few months, hence the importance.

    So, what would you do?
     
  2. Peter2150

    Peter2150 Global Moderator

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    Well my prejudice may show, but I would stick with Shadowprotect. For me personally, I just trust it more, and when it comes to backup and the ability to restore, for me price isn't a consideration. Ability to speedily recover is paramount.

    Pete
     
  3. LockBox

    LockBox Registered Member

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    If this matters to you, I don't know how seriously Drive Snapshot is still in development:

    Drive Snapshot - What's new
    V1.39 - 15 July 2008: Drive Snapshot 1.39

    * Supports Restore into Virtual Machines (VMWare/Virtual Server)
    * mounted Snapshots are write able (data are buffered in RAM) - and you can make a new snapshot of this virtual disk
    * Ability to exclude files and folders has been enhanced ( --exclude:\*.MP3 )
    * defect Images can be - within limits - repaired
    * allows in WinPE/BartPE Installation of additional (disk) drivers
    * fixes/tolerates some bugs in Vista/2008 X64

    V1.38 - 26 March 2007: Drive Snapshot 1.38

    * supports Microsoft VSS (useful for MS Exchange 2003 servers) (details)
    * supports mounting of up to 5 images at the same time
    * possibility to exclude Files or directories enhanced ( --exclude:\windows\$NtUninstall*)
    * default image size is 1500 MB

    works better with Windows Vista
    V1.37 - 28 February 2007: Drive Snapshot 1.37

    Still 1.37, but works better with Windows Vista (read more)
    V1.37 - 17 November 2005: Drive Snapshot 1.37

    * differential Backup
    * exclude files/directories from backup
    * command line replacement of some 'magic' strings $DATE,$DRIVE,...

    http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/news.htm
     
  4. Brian K

    Brian K Imaging Specialist

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    Sorry to reiterate, but in thousands of restores, with various software, I've never encountered a failure. Use what suits you.

    Drive Snapshot can't exclude the page file or hibernation file from a Win7 image and this needs to be fixed. Currently, Win7 images are too large.
     
  5. n8chavez

    n8chavez Registered Member

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    I'm sorry, my apologies, I meant to say that the license for Shadow Protect is restricted to a per-machine basis.

    There were a couple good points that were mentioned.

    I knew that already. Thank you know, because it's worth mentioning. This, I would assume means that the user needs to have the changed driver handy in order to use the following command, which might not be very reasonable.

    c:>snapshot --AddDriver

    Are you saying that the use of Hardware Independent Restoring software is irrelevant, in comparison with regular imaging software? If that is the case, may I ask what brought you to that conclusion? I am very interested to hear the reasoning to this because it would seem that there is a difference, but in your experience you are saying that there's not, right?

    If that is the case then , my personal preference would have to go to Drive Snapshot.
     
  6. Brian K

    Brian K Imaging Specialist

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    Nate,

    I wasn't thinking about restoring to different hardware. In 10 years of using imaging software I've never had to do it in reality. Whenever my motherboard failed, Dell gave me a new replacement motherboard and the old HD continued to work. I guess that's the closest I've come to it. My computer hasn't be stolen, burned, drowned, etc so I don't think restoring to different hardware is something that will need to be done except on a rare basis. But if it has to be done, I know I can do it with TBOSDT because I've restored images to very different hardware computers on about 10 occasions. So it doesn't concern me. On the other hand, I know you have had no success with TBOSDT, probably due to your nLite OS.
     
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