Shadow Protect: How do you use it?

I think what the "Machine ID" is may, like a lot of things in life be open to translation, or things have changed and I was not aware, (a highly likely possibility) but I was always lead to believe that it was a unique number stored on the system board. However having searched around the net, I see people asking about machine id on various forums populated by techy people and being asked "Which machine id."
Here's an example of one version of Machine ID.
http://www.elysiuminc.com/login/misc/machineid.html

 

So far issues arise with this activation thingy,i tryed myself as a test the way Erik did and sofar he is right.As for the reliability and speed and trustworthy of this software i have no complaints !

 

Well, ShadowProtect certainly doesn't use that Machine ID
At this moment, my situation is like this.

Offline snapshot : SP is not activated, but I'm able to see the Machine ID.
On-line snapshot : SP is activated and working properly and I can see the Machine ID.

I changed the numbers (not the structure), but this is the situation :
Offline snapshot : Machine ID = 7D2A-A2EB
On-line snapshot : Machine ID = 39A2-DCE7

How is that possible TWO different Machine ID's on the SAME computer ?
That is not a Hardware Machine ID, that is something else and that's why I got in trouble.
This is another proof that the activation program has a bug.

PS: I reported this to support quite some time ago, but I never got a reply.

 

Possibly SP when installed creates a unique one time id based randomly on elements of the hardware, and stores this somewhere on ur machine, such as the registry, and at their activation site, now when you uninstall SP this registry entry is left behind, so when you reinstall no new id is created since the program sees the original and uses that.. Now when you come to activate their actvation compares this "registry id" with the one they have from the first activation and if the same, activation is allowed. In Eriks case he has installed on a new snapshot, on installing the program sees there is no id present in reg,(or wherever) as this was a snap made prior to SP and generates a new random one, Thus when he goes to activate it does not match what they have their end, and so they assume it is a different machine. Of course this is all speculation, but if it was the case it could be easily rectified by making the id generation systematic rather that random.
It is really the only idea I can think of since a snapshot is an exact copy of the prior installation (unless of course on had installed a new OS in an empty snap), and is operating with exactly the same hardware.

 

OK. That is a plausible explanation, but that doesn't change anything.
A machine can only be identified by its hardware : one or more components.
SP has only to verify these components, send and store that information in a database at StorageCraft and check it again if the user tries to install SP again.
Once the verification matches with the previous verification, the user is allowed to reinstall SP.
They obvious don't do it this way and that is their mistake.

 

I can see that this could actually be the case, but surely the point of a machine ID is exactly that! ......A MACHINE ID, and not something to be left at the mercy of SOFTWARE! Software changes all the time, as in the case of different snapshots in FDR, but Hardware does not change that often. Surely a machine ID generated from hardware (which it should be) should also be a constant, and not subject to a registry entry!

 

I agree with that Erik, maybe in the future they will change slightly their verification procedure to simply log all available numbers a users hardware and OS gives up and if an activation fails it will be down to the user to tell them, if he is genuine, what he changed on his machine.
On the other hand I fear that this is likely to be a very rare occurrence for them, (no consolation to you I'm afraid) amongst a small subset of a minority group of people they are not really targeting. Thus they prolly won't do anything.

 

I find this thread interesting due that I am waiting to get SP v3 when it is out on 21th august. Thanks ErikAlbert for bringing these issues to light. I find it really worrying that there is a problem with the activation scheme of SP. I personally use other products that require activation and all of them use hardware based tokens that never change if the software is installed on the same machine (as it should be). I can activate these programs automatically without any problem even after reinstalling Windows from scratch. Some of these programs are Alcohol 120% and RedChairSoftware's Anapod Explorer and Notmad Explorer (for managing iPod and Creative MP3 players).

You lost access to the scheduler and the almost instantaneous incremental snapshots that IMO are 2 very strong points of SP.

May I ask, aside from the activation problems, did you have other reasons for changing from SP imaging to Karen's Replicator for your data partition? I have been thinking what I am going to do with my data partition too that has a size of 400GB. First I was thinking on imaging it as I will do with my OS partition, but replication has come in my list as an option too.

Thanks.

 

I'm 99% sure they won't change anything, because in most cases users won't have my problem and that's why, I'm the first one who was in trouble according grnxnm, unless they re-install their computer from scratch maybe.
Nevertheless, they did make a analysis mistake, but the cost is probably too high to change anything.
Another cheap excuse will be : "We don't have enough room to store all that information of each customer."
Another cheap excuse will be : "We only target companies, not home users."
I know all these excuses by heart already. Pffft

You can imagine, when each software company starts with a crippled activation like SP, how difficult it will be to re-install your computer from scratch in the future.
I have already about 30 softwares, that means 30 begging emails to get my softwares activated and let us hope they will believe us.
Freewares will have a big future, if it goes on like that.

 

Realy i can't understand that you have difficulties with ALL your licenced softwares to get activated,i have quite some but never had a problem like yours,so maybe you have a habit to manage these things not in the right way.

 

Maybe you don't reinstall your computer from scratch as much as me.
I don't really re-install my computer.
I zero my harddisk, not always.
Then I install Windows and then I re-install certain softwares.
If these softwares have activation, I like to know in advance what will happen, if I re-install these softwares in the future.
Then I restore my actual system and go on.

Not many users do that of course, but when I recommend a software at the company, I'm working for, I like to test these softwares, including their installation in different situations. I don't like unpleasant surprises.

 

My data partition contains nothing but folders and files, so they don't really need to be imaged.
My first test proved that Karen's Replicator is as fast as ShadowProtect.
KR was 1 minut slower than SP to backup more than 30gb.
I was surprised myself, because SP is probably the fastest image backup software at this moment.

Now I'm testing KR to see what happens if I add files, delete files or update files on the source harddisk.
KR seems to keep the source and destination harddisks synchronized.
So far I'm satisfied with the results.
I still have to test the total restore, but I don't expect any problems.

 

Pete,

What would be the purpose of uninstalling and reinstalling Rollback except if you wanted to do a defrag?

I am not clear on this. Do you mean that if you have one snapshot with SP on it, and then archive that snapshot to an external drive, that you will have to re-activate SP if you update your working snapshot with the archive?

Silver

 

Karen Replicator is not a real sync. app.like syncback and the like[such as realtime scanning for differences in sourse and destination,and updating on the fly]but KR is very reliable [backup and restore i tested many times and as always with zero errors !] and also extremely fast, so for a freeware i think you can't get any better.

PS: like to add that KR has no problems which whatever file ext. you throw at it,everything is backed up and restored

 

LOL, possibly, though I think more are in the camp of "I want a Mercedes Benz, but if I redecorate the garage, I don't wanna have to buy a new Mercedes.

 

Does Karen Replicator have any type of "incremental" backup support? ShadowProtect's incremental technology is capable of taking a backup which represent the full state of volumes within a few seconds (yeah, I know a lot of home users don't use this fast incremental feature, but the vast majority of our enterprise customers do, and they're our primary focus). Does Karen Replicator support easy disaster recovery of OS, apps, and data? I think a comparison of Karen Replicator to ShadowProtect is a pretty clear comparison of apples to oranges.

 

It makes sense if you realize that we don't target the home/end user crowd. We target the enterprise customers, who need to have continuous backups running on a scheduled basis. Enterprises aren't going to stop their servers to make periodic base images. Our licensing/activation scheme is designed mostly to prevent piracy among our target audience. Yes, you can steal some of our stuff if that's what you decide to do, and yes, it will hurt us. I can see my wording may have been a bit confusing. There is a limit on the number of times that a license can be reactivated in order to prevent piracy. Sometimes it can be hard to determine if the re-activations have occurred on the same computer, and therefore we have to cap the number of re-activations. However, if the user can illustrate that their re-activation is still on the same computer (say they are using some type of disk virtualization technology which makes this difficult to determine) then we'll definitely work with them to get them re-activated. We do what we can to make this process easy (as I said, Erik's case is the first time we've even had to deal with this). We have to do something to protect our work. We learned through sad (and very expensive) experience that if we don't lock up the product of our hard work, it will be stolen to the nth degree. ShadowUser has been nearly a complete loss for our company due to piracy.

 

I suspect most if not all would agree with you there, the mentioning of that particular software was to instigate it purely to backup a data partition, I believe the poster was talking about moving back to ATI for image solution.

 

I brought KR to the foreground in some earlier threads but always referring to it as a simple backup solution and i no way even remotely suggesting it to equal SP,they are good stuff each in their own right.At some moment in a thread i had the feeling that a prominent member would choose KR over SP,so sensing the misunderstanding i react saying something to the effect " THIS IS COMPARING A STEAK WITH DOGSHIT "as we like to say here in Holland.I was admonished by a forum member as being too harsh,i can understand that now,but at the time i would prevent confusion by saying things very bold.

huup.

 

It makes my destination harddisk = my source harddisk and that is enough for me, at least for my DATA partition and it does that very fast.
If I reinstall my harddisk, I like to have a backup software that works immediately without telling me that I can't activate it.
I uninstalled SP and re-installed ATI.

When I re-install my computer completely in September, I will re-install SP again - one time in one snapshot - if I still have activation problems I ditch it for good. I can't work with such softwares.
That so called "Machine ID" is not a real Hardware Machine ID. It's just an Activation Code created by StorageCraft, which has nothing to do with hardware at all.
I'm not the very first user, who has activation problems. I'm the very first user, who tested this activation on the same machine and it doesn't work in all situations because StorageCraft doesn't verify the real Hardware Machine ID, it only has the label "Machine ID" to fool the average user.

 

Interesting. I think Karen Replicator could be useful for offsite replication. The karenware.com site mentions that you can exclude files from copy. Do you guys know if this exclusion can be applied with wildcards, or must you explicitly specify the files to be excluded from replication.