ShadowProtect v4 has been released!

I agree with you Osaban and that is precisely why I worded it the way I did. "I've noticed that some in this thread have suggested that imaging and/or restoring times have increased by as much as 33%." This information was derived from a poster who claimed that restore time jumped from 6 minutes to 8 minutes. The poster did not explicitly state that the time jumped 33% and that is why I said "...some in this thread have suggested..." Also, notice that the way I worded it took into account variations in system setup and other variables by not suggesting that backup/restore times in fact increased by 33%.

 

The other way round here.SP v4 is faster than vs 3.5.2.

 

There you go, that means it could be related to several factors. I haven't tested it with my Vista machine as I should pay for the upgrade, and I don't think I will for the time being.

 

The upgrade to vs 4 was/is free if you have maintenance.Well worth it imo.


I backed up my c:\ with paragon driver backup pro and then with sp4.

It took paragon 25 mins.Sp v4 did it in 4 mins !

 

You must be doing something wrong. The difference between full backups of Paragon and SP v3.5.1, using normal compression for both, was about 4-5 minutes. However, Paragon normal compression always gave me a resultant image about 400-700 MB smaller than that of SP. Hence the 4-5 minutes longer time duration for Paragon.

The time-for-full-backup difference between SP v4 and Paragon must be similar.

 

Are people having problems activating this version my lic with a maintenance contract does not activate.

I have contacted support but they don't seem very joined up

 

Thanks for the heads-up.

 

I "cold" image using ShadowProtect and Paragon Drive Backup 10 Pro. Both use Windows PE as the bootable environment. The times noted by Banshee are consistent with my times. Much, much longer with Paragon. This is with default settings using the lowest level of encryption.

That said, Paragon seems as bullet proof as ShadowProtect and is an easy recommendation. It's just notably slower...

 

My timings were for an online full backup using both. Still, 4 vs 25 minutes seems odd. Perhaps it is a driver issue or something.

 

There is no way paragon is 525% slower than shadowprotect.
I could accept 20-30% slower on some machines but 525%?

Panagiotis

 

Using the SP 3.5.2 recovery CD on my netbook it takes about 5-6 minutes to backup/restore 11 GB. I have Paragon Drive 10 Backup on a fast core duo notebook, and it takes 30 minutes to backup 13 GB. My main notebook with SP 3.5.2 is around 8 minutes to backup/restore 20 GB. These figures are similar to HAN and Banshee times.

 

Sorry, but I cannot accept it.
Even if you copied/pasted 13gb of large files to a usb hard disk (average speed 26mb/s) it would take 8,5 minutes to complete the transfer.
Unless there is a hardware or driver problem on that machine, this cannot happen.
Paragon is slower but not that slow...

Panagiotis

 

I'm certainly not trying to discredit Paragon, but these are the times that I have experienced using the recovery CD. I cannot rule out that there might be a faster way, I've been using the backup wizard as instructed. Acronis TI 9 is even slower in another notebook. I'd like to add that 30 minutes is definitely longer than 6 or 8 minutes, but still an acceptable time for such an operation.

 

I will try to do a comparison this weekend and see how things shake out. (Remember that I only do "cold" images, not from within Windows. Both apps use Windows PE, though probably not the same build. That could be a variable that could lead to at least some of the differences.)

 

I do not say that you are inventing it or anything like that. Only that such differences are not possible(with the default settings).

If you are going to test, pay attention that both are using Windows PE version 2.0 (or higher). Windows PE 1.6 and earlier versions and BartPE do not support multicore processors (they see only one core) and if you test a PE 2.0 versus PE 1.6, e.g. on a quad, you will see a difference in speed of 300% even between the same imaging application.

Windows PE versions

Panagiotis

 

Yes, of course.
Paragon 10 and 2010 versions do use Windows PE 2.1.

But the difference in speed reported here indicate, that either linux, dos or custom made PEs were used for testing.
And if this is true paragon should be compared with shadowprotects PE 1.6 (2003) enviroment and not with the PE 3.0(Win 7) one.

Panagiotis

 

Actually paragon _is_ that "slow" here. Tested on both my machines: Gulftown and an "older" i975.Os win 7, x64 on both

 

Now, I accept your timings.
Paragon 64bit version is indeed very S...L...O...W.

Panagiotis

 

Ok. I sat down and spent some time this morning to run these very UNofficial tests. Let me say up front that my memory was wrong when I earlier said 40 to 45 minutes for Paragon. It is longer than ShadowProtect but not nearly that much.

The tests are only for image creation, not restoration. It was from a healthy Dell Vostro 1400 laptop, XP SP3. The hard drive in the PC is a 7200 rpm drive backing up to a Toshiba USB portable that runs @ 5400 rpm. The images were created "cold". IOW, from the bootable CD for each product, NOT from within Windows (which is the intended usage by design) (What can I say, I am a heretic!) The C drive which is currently @ 14 GB (used) was the only item imaged.

First up was Paragon Drive Backup 10.0 Professional. All the settings were default except that I added a password (I assume that means encryption is added?) I don't know how to tell what build of Win PE Paragon uses but it is either a Win Vista or 7 environment. Time to image was 19 minutes 15 seconds. Much better than my earlier memory! Image size was 8.13 GB.

Then I imaged using the new ShadowProtect Desktop 4.0. It too was all default settings except for the addition of a password (with the lowest level of encryption.) I used the Win 7 environment (no idea which Win PE build this is.) Time to image was 9 minutes 8 seconds. Image size was 7.68 GB.

Finally, I thought it would be interesting to compare ShadowProtect 3.5.2 with 4.0. With the same settings, time to image was 6 minutes 13 seconds (same image size.) Not a significant change but certainly noticeable.

Everyone can make their own conclusions as whether this test has any meaning or not. As I said earlier, both Paragon and ShadowProtect are very good apps. That said, there are speed differences (and as it turns out, some differences in image file sizes.)

 

Thanks. As you said hopefully this will answer a lot of questions. 19 minutes for Paragon compared to 6 minutes for SP 3.5.2 is 3 times longer but still acceptable for a backup (2 times longer than SP4)

I'm still wondering why do I experience a longer time with SP4 (you have confirmed it as well, 3 minutes difference) and Banshee doesn't. Hopefully someone from Storagecraft will chip in.

 

We're looking into this right now. My gut instinct says this is caused by the change from Vista-based WinPE to Win7-based WinPE. It may not actually be WinPE itself, but different variations of the storage drivers which match your specific storage controller. The miniport driver with Vista-WinPE may just be faster than the one that ships with Win7. I doubt that it 's an issue with the MS storage stack components between Vista-WinPE and Win7-WinPE, nor do I believe it's due to any changes in sbrun.exe. However, like I said, we're looking into it. Thanks for the heads-up.

Update: Our testing shows that this is not in our code (the module that does the backup is sbrun.exe, and the 3.5.2 and 4.0.0 versions of sbrun.exe have identical performance). Therefore this is either caused by some difference between Vista-WinPE and Win7-WinPE, or is caused by a storage controller driver in the Win7 distro which performs slower than the driver for the same storage controlle4r in Vista. We have seen this before - cases where different versions of a storage controller driver have different performance results. If you have the time, can you tell us what kind of storage controller you are using? If it's on the motherboard, then just let us know your chipset.

 

Thank you for looking into the matter. I'm afraid you've lost me with all this technical terminology. The computer with the slow performance is a netbook with XP Pro SP3. The only thing I could find about 'storage controller' is:
Intel(R) 8280 1GBM/GHM (ICH-M Family) Serial ATA Storage Controller - 27C4