New Drive Snapshot build released.

Tony,

I'm not a fan of clones as a backup but I have tested the following with Win7.

Ghost 15 SP1. Works well but is a fairly large install.

Image for Windows. Works well and is a 7 MB install. I think you would prefer this and there is a 30 day trial so you can test before buying.


Edit... Ghost 15 only does partition clones so you must clone to unallocated space or a partition without a drive letter.

IFW does partition and entire drive clones.

 

Thanks for the suggestions. Why don't you like cloners for backup?

I see Terabyte also has Copywipe, maybe that would work? Oops, copywipe doesn't lock the drive before copying so no good.

 

Images vs. Clones as a backup.

Images can be created on a schedule so no manual effort is required. Clones have to be done manually and ideally the new HD should be disconnected from the motherboard after the clone process unless you are using a boot manager which can hide each OS from the other.
Images are files, so you can keep multiple generations. A clone gives you just one generation.
Images can be stored anywhere a file can be stored. Even a USB flash drive, SD card, network drive or optical disc. Clones cannot.
Images can be compressed and only capture sectors in use. Clones are not only uncompressed, they also duplicate free space in the partition.


A clone doesn't always boot just by removing the old HD. If you have broken the rules of cloning, the clone won't boot at all but will require some type of repair to get it to boot.

 

Although it is called CopyWipe for Windows, it isn't intended for cloning the OS from Windows for the reason you outlined. It can be used from a WinPE disk to clone the OS.
It's easier to use CopyWipe for DOS if you want to clone from a boot disk.

IFW does lock the drive so a clone (IFW calls it Copy) can be done from Windows.

 

I guess IFW is the best, it can do both so I'll check it out. Thanks.

 

Tony,

Please let us know what you find. Better start a new thread. We have diverged from the DS topic.

 

Panagiotis,

Just a comment on Disk Signatures and WinXP. BING was in use so the results may be different from a non boot manager system.

I cloned a HD in Windows (IFW) and shutdown. In BING the Disk Signatures on each HD were noted to be the same. I booted into the old OS (I left the new HD in place) and then shut down. The Disk Signature on the new HD had been changed.

I cloned a HD in Windows (IFW) and shutdown. In BING the Disk Signatures on each HD were noted to be the same. I booted into the new OS (I left the old HD in place) and then shut down. The Disk Signature on the new HD (again) had been changed.

The old OS was deleted and the new WinXP failed to load (froze at Welcome Screen) as I had broken the second rule of cloning by allowing the new OS to see the old OS on the first boot.

 

I cloned (using IFW) a HD containing a Windows7 OS and shutdown. The Disk Signatures on each HD were the same. I tried to boot into the new OS (I left the old HD in place) but Win7 rebooted after loading for only 5 seconds. The disk Signature on the new HD had NOT been changed. I did a BCD Edit on the new OS but it still rebooted 5 seconds into the loading. The Disk Signature on the new HD had still NOT been changed. I changed the Disk Signature on the new HD and the new Win7 OS loaded fully. Win7 was shutdown and the Disk Signature changed back to the original. Again, Win7 wouldn't load and rebooted 5 seconds into the loading. The old Win7 was deleted but new Win7 still wouldn't load. The Disk Signature on the old HD was changed and the new Win7 OS loaded fully to the desktop. So Win7 is more strict than WinXP if both Disk Signatures are the same.

Note, we shouldn't be leaving both HDs in situ after completing a cloning procedure.

 

This is easy with drive snapshot. After you restored your desired image to the external start a new restore procedure. At the menu of the drives select the internal drive and click on "Clean disk signature", then select the e-sata drive and click on "Restore Disk Signature"; Then close drive snapshot and reboot.
Now the Os should boot from your external drive.

I have gone this way a few years back but is a pain in the but. It will work as long as you eject your external after you cloned it but you will have to disable the internal from the bios or unplug it all together before booting to your external.

Panagiotis

 

Drive snapshot canot restore on a blank space; you'll have first to create a partition on the empty HD and then restore or restore first the mbr/partition table and then restore the image.

I never, had the chance to test drivesnap on my real system, because it could not identify the correct disk needed to be restored, and since at the time I had 4 disks I couldn't afford the program to gamble with the automatic restore.

Panagiotis

 

You are correct about this. Windows will not update/modify the guid of the second disk until the OS is restarted. When you update the guid windows do not update it right away in their registry, only during boot time; but during the boot windows first load the registry and then check if it corrispondes with the real guid. During this they find a disk that it's guid both in the disk and in the registry are the same (and do not change it) and another that has the same identical guid on the disk but differs in the registry so they restore the guid from the registry to the disk.

ps. Deleting the original OS partition will not resolve this unless you clear or modify the GUID on the original disk too.

Panagiotis

 

I've used DS actively (big fan) for maybe 6 months now, but have never had to do a restore with it to a new hard drive or different partition. How reliable is it in such situations?

Is there a command line switch for the "Save the complete disk, including unused sectors" GUI option? (Either it's not in the help file or I just failed to find it).

I also hope the author finds a way to add backup capability to the DOS version or "diskette" of DS (to make it comparable to Image for DOS), although in my experience DOS based backups are often significantly slower on many machines than backups from Widows or WinPE?

 

From memory it is easy to make a DS boot CD without needing a floppy drive. The DS installation makes a nice boot disk with Network, NTFS and UDMA support. You need UDMA support for IDE HDs otherwise the restore is quite slow.

Using the DS boot disk for a DOS restore is fairly easy. Using DS from a WinPE disk is much easier.

 

I will try this when I get back. Must I do it in this order -

1. Restore partition structure
2. Restore image to HD
3. Restore disk signature

What if I do 1, then 3, then 2, will that be incorrect? I guess I'm asking if step 2 above (restoring the image) will erase the disk signature?

Now when I do this and hopefully find that the external boots ok, what happens to the internal drive when I want to boot off it again. I have zeroed it. When I disconnect the external will the internal boot again? Will the GUID from the registry be loaded to it or I wonder if I will get my error screen again.

From your above discussion with Brian, I note that the GUID is defined as the disk signature, yes?

 

Either order will do the job. DS does restore not modify the NT disk signature.

If you do not have both disk attached it should work fine.

Only when referring to the windows registry and the entries in the bootmgr.
GUID= Globally unique identifier and windows use it for every disk, partition and every hardware (real or virtual) installed in the pc.
Disk Siganture = NT Disk Signature
In the registry you'll find the disks and partitions GUIDs under the registry key "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices\".
eg. from my virtual system:
nt Disk signature = 5EE85736
GUID and DOS registry keys
For my c: partition
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices]
"\\??\\Volume{8cd85488-8480-11df-bae6-001b77f133a9}"=hex:36,57,e8,5e,00,00,10,\
00,00,00,00,00
"\\DosDevices\\C:"=hex:36,57,e8,5e,00,00,10,00,00,00,00,00
And for my d: partition
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices]
"\\??\\Volume{8cd85488-8480-11df-bae6-001b77f133a9}"=hex:36,57,e8,5e,00,00,10,\
00,19,00,00,00
"\\DosDevices\\D:"=hex:36,57,e8,5e,00,00,10,00,19,00,00,00

Panagiotis

 

Panagiotis
Just to get it clear, when you say zero the disk signature of my internal drive first then restore the disk signature to the external, what I have been doing is restoring the signature to the external, shutting down, disconnecting the internal, then reboot with the external and then get my problem.

I read on one of your other posts that the disk signatures are only read at boot time so if my internal is disconnected at boot time how can there be a conflict?

 

Windows reads the signatures and updates its registry when a disk is inserted
(in your case boot time).
I said to clear the disk signature on the original in case you want both disks attached.
By the way, you do perform the cloning/restoring from outside the OS right (eg. winPE)?

Panagiotis

 

Actually no, I've been using drive snapshot within windows.

 

Don't.
In windows vista and 7 the BCD is always open and can cause this kind of problems with the bootmgr GUIDs entries. (have not tested it in XP though...)

Restoring from a WinPE enviroment should resolve your problem.

Panagiotis

 

Can anyone here speak for the reliability & ease of use of Drive Snapshot? Please post good or bad experiences. I have never used Drive Snapshot & never heard of it until now.

 

For me the DriveSnapshot and IFW are the kings of reliability in the imaging world.

It's very easy to use. Just give it a try.

Panagiotis

 

I've used DS for over six months on 6 different machines and it's worked great across at least a dozen restores from BartPE. The backups for those restores were sometimes made from Windows, sometimes from BartPE and mostly consisted of full images, although one or two had a differential image counterpart as well. Also some of those images were made of and restored to an encrypted system partition after it was mounted with TrueCrypt. The feature to mount ('show as virtual drive') and explore a snapshot image to recover files from them has also worked flawlessly for me.

I did experience failed restores when I used the feature introduced in v1.40 iirc to initiate the restore from Windows, and have subsequently not used it. There have been numerous DS updates since then so I suppose it should be reliable now, but I prefer BartPE.

Backup speeds are excellent using the VSS-mode, and sometimes significantly better than with other programs or at least comparable (YMMV depending on the hardware). The restore speed is not as fast on my computers as with Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 or ShadowProtect 3.5 (ymmv), but I think DS restores the files to their original locations whereas I think Acronis may change the location of some files. (I use UltimateDefrag 3 to optimize file placement and to move low performance files to the end of the partition, but they don't always stay there after a restore depending on what software is used, which can result in fast restore followed by the need for a lengthy re-defrag).

I have no experience with DS involving restores to different hardware or resized partitions, and would like to hear feedback on that myself.

 

Over the 3+ years i've used DS, it's been 100% reliable (and that includes its ability to backup/restore my Rollback Rx environment). Ease of use is also excellent within any Windows GUI, however using DS' DOS disk to restore is not for those who are uncomfortable with DOS commands.

That said, seeing that you already use Acronis True Image and ShadowProtect I don't think there's anything to be gained (funtionally) with DS. However, DS is far less bloated than the two you have and DS is also portable (those were the two features that first attracted me to DS).

My only gripe with DS is that Tom (the developer) doesn't publish the changes/fixes for each new build.

Aaron

 

Well, happy new year! Finally got time to try this again and results are still poor. Here is what I did

Took pandlouk's advice and built a Win7PE3 flash drive, really cool actually. Added drive snapshot to it.

Within WinXP, Imaged my main WinXP HD with a .vhd of Win7 on it as dual boot. The image went to an eSATA drive. Shut down, disconnected the main HD to simulate failure, connected new HD to exactly the same sata internal cable as the simulated failed one, reboot with the flash drive, run Drive Snapshot and restore the image to that new HD (restore partition structure, and restore disk signature, then copy restore image).

Shut down, go into BIOS and reboot with new HD. Boot menu does not appear, only error message with GUID info (I will try to attach camera snapshot). With the error message on screen, I press enter and WinXP boots fine. So...I'm back where I started, the same results as if I restored the image from WinXP itself instead of the flash drive. Can't get into Win7, only WinXP.

What I did here exactly was simulating a failed HD. As of now I can't restore my HD to a new one by image restoring. If I run the Win7 setup CD and go and correct the bootstore like I did initially when I made the dual boot, I could probably make it work but that's not what restoring an image is all about. The restore should be identical to the source.

So...what next? Try another program I guess??

 

Does your system use a 100 MB boot partition common to many Windows 7 setups, and if so, did your image of the main WinXP HD include that partition?