Rollback Home Free Help

Discussion in 'backup, imaging & disk mgmt' started by khanyash, Mar 17, 2015.

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  1. Keatah

    Keatah Registered Member

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    Oh sure. Onsite, offsite.. Whatever you want to do. Depends how fast you need to get to it. But I always recommend data go offsite. Cloud services, relative's house, different part of the building, take-home.
     
  2. Kurtis Smejkal

    Kurtis Smejkal Registered Member

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    On a personal note, I think cloud based computing is the best. I have 1TB with DropBox and I backup my image files of my C: and D: drives to it.
     
  3. bjm_

    bjm_ Registered Member

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    So, your user base is only in the thousands. That's not much of a user base imo. Perhaps hundreds of thousands is a closer count. I'd be hesitant to use software with only thousands of users...even with your impressive list of clients and partners.
     
  4. Kurtis Smejkal

    Kurtis Smejkal Registered Member

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    Well if you're going to quote me on exact numbers then I can get back to you ;)
     
  5. bjm_

    bjm_ Registered Member

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    Well, if you're going to write <We at HDS have thousands of users everyday who are happy with the product> then I'll be reading...
     
  6. Peter2150

    Peter2150 Global Moderator

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    Hi Kurtis

    I've love torture testing, and I would be remiss if I didn't make a positive post. Since power is a problem here, I have UPS on my systems but I've also had power supply failures, so I test. I'd never tested Raxco's IR for this so I did a swap between snapshots which is where it would be most vulnerable and at that point I did a power reset. System rebooted and was fine. So I decided to try it with Rollback.

    I installed Rollback, created two snapshots, and then initiated a swap between them. While the snapshot was loading I did a power reset. System came back up and reloaded that snapshot, and all was well. Thought you'd like to know.

    Pete
     
  7. Kurtis Smejkal

    Kurtis Smejkal Registered Member

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    That's very interesting, good to know!

    Thinking of it, the snapshots are stored on the hard drive, so should be safe from power failure. However, if you were to have a power failure while it's creating a snapshot there's a chance that snapshot could be corrupted, as an add-on to this.

    I'll have to look into this IR program though, has me interested...
     
  8. Peter2150

    Peter2150 Global Moderator

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    Kurtis

    They did one thing years ago, when it was the old FDISR program. Originally their stuff was in the mbr, but I think they moved it to the partition table or somewhere's else in the first two sectors.

    Pete
     
  9. nozzle

    nozzle Registered Member

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    Hi all. I use RecImg to backup my OS and was wondering if I used Rollback Home and things went awry with Rollback Home, would RecImg be able to rescue me?
     
  10. manolito

    manolito Registered Member

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    Incidentally I just finished testing InstantRecovery for 2 days. Enonod's comments in the Ax64 thread made me curious after seeing that Pandlouk and Peter2150 are strong supporters of this software.

    I mostly agree with Enonod, this software is slow and clumsy and old fashioned.

    Creating the first "snapshot" took more than 75 minutes for 29 GB (AMD Dual Core 2x1.8 GHz). Updating this snapshot after just uninstalling one single software took almost 30 minutes (hard to see how the software uses some advanced differential updating/copying engine).

    Booting into a different snapshot is indeed extremely fast, even faster than Rollback. But if updating a snapshot is this slow, I would not call this a snapshot. Making an incremental with most imagers is much much faster.

    Like Rollback the software creates its snapshots on the system drive. But unlike Rollback they can be exported to an external HDD or archived externally. But before you can boot into an exported snapshot it has to be imported to the system drive again.

    You cannot mount snapshots, no way to just retrieve single files from snapshots. The pre-boot screen does not use the BCD Store, it modifies the MBR. But most important for me this software does not offer any disaster recovery:

    If your system drive is totally wiped (or you had to buy a new drive) then there is no way to get back to business with InstantRecovery even with snapshots on an external HDD. You would have to reinstall Windows, install IR and then import your external snapshots. Takes forever... So just like for Rollback you would need to use an additional image backup software.


    Cheers
    manolito
     
  11. bjm_

    bjm_ Registered Member

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    excerpt from Rx Chat today
    Samuel Smith 5:30:34 PM
    At the moment there is no imaging program that can capture RollBack Rx and its snapshots. This has to do with how the software installs and encrypts its snapshots on the sector-level of the hard drive. We're working on Drive Cloner Rx to do this.

    Samuel Smith 5:30:47 PM
    What you can do at the moment is restore an external image, but it will not have the RollBack Rx subconsole.

    Samuel Smith 5:30:54 PM
    Or its snapshots.

    Samuel Smith 5:31:02 PM
    So once this was done, you would need to re-install the program.

    bjm 5:32:47 PM
    So, I should Image before rollback install..

    Samuel Smith 5:33:02 PM
    I recommend either doing that, or uninstalling RollBack Rx and then taking an image.


    Samuel Smith 5:35:39 PM
    You can also take an image of any state you're in. However, those images will not capture RollBack Rx's subconsole or snapshots. So it's best to remove the program first before taking an image.

    bjm 5:36:19 PM
    wow ...a lot to grasp

    Samuel Smith 5:36:35 PM
    That's why we're trying to simplify the process with Drive Cloner Rx 6.0!
     
    Last edited: Apr 2, 2015
  12. TheRollbackFrog

    TheRollbackFrog Imaging Specialist

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    Nozzle, when you restore that image... the image will be good (CURRENT SYSTEM STATE, no snapshots) but the system will be unBOOTable. If you follow HDS' procedure for making it BOOTable, you will wind up with a system that has an inactive Rollback, no snapshots, and it will be at the state it was when you imaged it. Rollback will have to be uninstalled at that point and reinstalled.
     
  13. Kurtis Smejkal

    Kurtis Smejkal Registered Member

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    Hmm, have to worry about that too. Because if something happens within Windows it's screwed. I mean, I know the same could happen with RollBack Rx and the Subsystem, but I guess I always fear BSOD!

    After Peter mentioning it I checked it out and I have to agree with a lot of what you say. Biases aside, it was slow to take a snapshot, and this is even on a VM with next to nothing aside from Chrome. It took 9 minutes, which is much more then the second (or less) it takes for RollBack Rx to take a snapshot.

    I'm hesitant to even say it's a snapshot program ala RollBack Rx. In my experience it had more in common with imaging software.

    Interesting things they're doing though. I made particular note of the ability to import/export snapshots. For RollBack Rx that was the one thing I took away that I thought could be better.
     
  14. nozzle

    nozzle Registered Member

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    Thank you Mr. Frog. I think I will just backup my OS partition with IFD and save it for a rainy day. I haven't tried RecImg on a Rollback Rx installed machine. But, I feel confident that IFD will be good insurance against any problems I may have with HDS products.
     
  15. TheRollbackFrog

    TheRollbackFrog Imaging Specialist

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    Nozzle, make sure you IFD image is RAW & COLD (all sectors) if you want all your snapshots back. If it's not RAW and the image was COLD (and Rollback's installed), you'll only have your Baseline image returned, nothing since that time... and it will be unBOOTAble as above.

    The safest thing to do is to unINSTALL Rollback, then image your system (HOT or COLD) and you'll have your reference system.
     
    Last edited: Apr 2, 2015
  16. Kurtis Smejkal

    Kurtis Smejkal Registered Member

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    There's no conflicts with the software from where I stand. We haven't tested this product exclusively, so it may be worth your time to test in a VM environment first.

    The only issue I see is that if you take an image, it's not going to capture your snapshots. So RollBack Rx and it's snapshots would be excluded from that image file.

    As is mentioned all over the internet (or at least the parts I scour) Drive Cloner Version 5 currently doesn't capture snapshots either. However in the near future (End of April) we're looking at releasing Version 6 which will capture those.

    The main thing with RollBack Rx Home Edition is to be careful of Windows Updates. Depending on what Microsoft changes (and we never know) it could compromise the infrastructure on which RollBack Rx is based around. So I suggest keeping an eye on our Forum where we give the go aheads on Windows Update. Home Edition will change your Windows settings to not automatically install updates, I'd take advantage of this window and research the possible affects of that particular update.

    Any other questions, feel free to ask!
     
  17. Peter2150

    Peter2150 Global Moderator

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    The import export is almost secondary to the ability to create off disk archives. WIth them there is a very unique ability. If all I have is a year old image, I can restore that and then use the archive to get current.

    Pete
     
  18. nozzle

    nozzle Registered Member

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    [QUOTE="Any other questions, feel free to ask![/QUOTE]

    Okay. Will Reboot Restore be affected by a Windows update?
     
  19. Keatah

    Keatah Registered Member

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    Offline sector-by-sector imaging captures everything, console, snapshots, partition table, mbr, slack space, hidden space, unallocated-but-referenced space, encryption..
     
  20. bjm_

    bjm_ Registered Member

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    I'll go back to Chat and tell em'. Chat advised no way to image Rx snaps...only the current state.
     
  21. Keatah

    Keatah Registered Member

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    I don't think they know what they're talking about.
     
  22. bjm_

    bjm_ Registered Member

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    Yeah, 03-16-2015 HDS introduced Home Edition Free. So, I've been reading HDS n' probed Chat. #111
     
  23. pandlouk

    pandlouk Registered Member

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    If the update ovewrites the mbr or the bootsequence in general yes. Otherwise no.

    Reboot Restore shares the main technology and subconsole of Rollback RX but do not share Rollback RX's filesystem and that makes it much more stable.

    Panagiotis
     
  24. Tarnak

    Tarnak Registered Member

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    I received an e-mail recently from Horizondatasys to say Rollback was now free, because I originally bought FD-ISR way back in 2006 from them...and still use it today in my XP system.

    However, I would like to know if I would be tempting fate to install, while running FD-ISR [ I currently have 4 snapshots].
     
  25. pandlouk

    pandlouk Registered Member

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    Something is wrong in your configuration or your antivirus/hips interfered with the process. 75 minutes to copy 29GB = 6mb/s is extremely low. Even on a slow 2.5 hdd 5400rpm the speed should be around 28-29mb/s. InstantRecovery uses VSS to copy files and if you got a speed of 6mb/s then your imaging apps should copy with a speed that not exceeds 9-12mb/s.

    That is why the program has the "anchoring" feature; to be able to have some directories constant in every snapshot.
    InstantRecovery does not use the MBR but the PBR.
    Actually, as you just said, you can get back to business if you replace your drive but it does take much longer (although not the times that you described unless there is a big conflict somewhere).

    Panagiotis
     
    Last edited: Apr 3, 2015
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