ShadowProtect (Trial/Evaluation) what's the difference?

I have read a lot of good things about ShadowProtect so I went to the StorageCraft website and see that they have a link for a "trial" and then an application form (!) for a "full evaluation." Does anyone here know the difference? I don't understand companies that want to make things as difficult as possible to evaluate and then purchase their program. I bought ShadowUser once upon a time and the experience of just purchasing the product was a nightmare. Anyway, I digress. What's the difference between a "thirty day free trial" and a "full evaluation" that requires I fill out an application form. Anyone?

 

Perhaps you should also have a look at Power Shadow. It is still free and there is a long thread about it on this forum so check it out. Search the words "Power Shadow".

 

Free trial, no restore feature.
Full evaluation- restore feature works as well( as they use MS recovery environment and they have to pay to MS so u ned to fill a form for full evaluation, but it is worth the effort I think).

 

If you d/l the trial and decide to purchase you would have to uninstall the trial and reinstall the purchased copy. If I remember correctly you cannot do a restore.

You can request a copy of the*full evaluation where it fully functional and if you purchase you don't have to reinstall, just put in your key.

 

D'oh! Sorry, was a bit excited about the Power Shadow and thought it was Shadow Surfer etc until I double checked ... arrghh h... Shadow this and shadow that ...

 

I see, Pete. It all makes sense now. I think I will apply. I'd like to see what all the fuss is about. I use my old trusty Pre-Symantec Powerquest Drive Image 2002 (in my opinion, the best ever made) and have used IFW, which does an adequate job, but ShadowProtect looks interesting indeed.

Thanks!

 

LOL. I have done the same mistake somewhere here. It is indeed confusing with all the shadows

 

Good One Pete, I was going to type that. If you know that, well were dating ourselves. Excuse me while I get my cane, so I can have my Geritol.

Regarding ShadowProtect - Still waiting for the NEW & improved ver3. Then TI will go to my bit shredder, 1's & 0's go in & halves, eights come out.

Take Care
Rico

 

I would also recommend ShadowProtect, rather than Acronis True Image, although I use ATI myself.
I have the impression, that ShadowProtect has a support, that listens to its CUSTOMERS to improve it. I can't say the same about Acronis.
But I have no good reason to ditch ATI, so I keep it.

 

The Trial version of ShadowProtect is the fully-functional installed portion of the product. It will expire in 30 days (after which you won't be able to take additional backups within your normal Windows environment, however you can still mount backup images, and I believe you may also be able to restore backup images as well). However, you can activate an installed Trial version using a purchased product key, which converts it into the full commercial version. There is no need to uninstall the Trial version in order to activate it.

The "Full Evaluation" of ShadowProtect is basically an .ISO file for the bootable CD recovery environment (which you download and burn to CD). This recovery environment CD is based on Microsoft's Windows Preinstallation Environment (WinPE) which is basically Windows bootable from a CD. The idea here is that generally speaking you get the same device coverage (for storage and network hardware support) from WinPE as you do from regular Windows itself. This means that for most cases a WinPE environment will be able to see your hardware and be useful for restore purposes. Any time a WinPE distro is handed out, a royalty has to be paid to Microsoft, and this is why StorageCraft can't simply make this .ISO file available for general download. It's an unfortunate, but necessary, inconvenience. Sorry.

While you are evaluating various backup products, make sure that, before you purchase one of them, you check its recovery environment to make sure that you can see your drives/partitions/volumes within the recovery environment. If not, then you may have trouble restoring your system.

 

That is quite generous. My 30 days of evaluation is ending any day now. Knowing that I can restore the images I have done during the evaluation period even after the 30 days is great. I didnt think that would happen.
That gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling, and whenever that happens that company can expect a new customer
I have now done at least 10 image backups (including incremental) and no issues what so ever, so the reliability I am looking for sure seems to be there.

 

I hope you tested the restoration as well, because that is the most important one and the most exciting one too.

 

I thought I'd verify this for you all. After the trial expires, you won't be able to start any new backup or restore jobs using the installed ShadowProtect product. The installed product will let you mount any image, even after the trial expires, to restore individual files. Also, you can boot the recovery environment CD and restore images after the trial has expired.

 

Pete: Would ShadowProtect live happily with Image for DOS? I'm a big IFD fan but the idea of blazingly fast interim snapshots is certainly appealing.

 

when you buy shadow protect desktop is it a download or a shipped cd?
or do you get an option for both?
if you can get a cd is it bootable?
or do you create a bootable cd in the program for the bare system recovery?
i will probably test out shadow protect desktop for myself soon but not on my main pc.
i just want to buy a cheap pc for myself and then install fresh windows xp on it and then test shadow protect desktop by creating the image then restoring it
lodore

 

Yes of course, I have done the restore 10 times too If it would have failed or given me any kind of grief even once, I would not trust it. As I said earlier in some thread, Image for Windows has set the standard in reliability for me.
ShadowProtect has proven (for me) to reach that standard plus it has more options than IFW/IFD that I am looking for.

 

When you buy it, you are given a private custom link to download the .ISO for the retail recovery environment. Burn this ISO file to a CD and the CD is the bootable recovery environment. A tool like CDBurnerXP is good for burning an .ISO file to a CD. You can pay something like $10-15USD extra if you want the media to be sent to you. I'd just burn your own disc and save some money.

A note on the bootable CD recovery environment. You can actually take backups as well as restore when you have booted to this bootable recovery CD. That way if you really don't want to install anything, you can still backup and restore. Also, some people prefer to only backup from another environment, to ensure that the backup captures their volume(s) in a perfectly quiet state.

 

thanks for the information.
on this pc i make the images in windows but i know that other programs can interfere that way.
so when i build myself a pc i will make the images outside windows.
on average how long does it take to create a simple 1gb image?
or 1gb of an image
lodore

 

You are a smart man.

 

That depends a lot on the speed of your source/destination disks. You'll probably spend more time booting the CD than you will backing up the volume. I'd guess it'll take about a minute or so to do the backup.