Storagecraft utils

Sorry for the delay in answering to this post, got caught up in the festive celebrations.

I no longer have the email that I received from the StorageCraft sales people, this was deleted pretty much straight away on receiving. From memory, the message was a curt one line message stating “NO (in capital letters) we don’t upgrade the free version”.

I’ve been retired for sixteen years but most of my working life was spent dealing with the public in the sales and service field. One of the first things learnt was that any request for information about a product had to be treated as if dealing with a potential customer. The way I answered the request could mean a new customer, or the loss of an existing customer.

The email I received from StorageCraft sales people had no salutations, I wasn’t addressed by name and neither did the sales person give their name. There was no explanation why they didn’t upgrade the free version, nor were there any hooks to show that they do offer a $20 rebate for a limited time. They could have mentioned downloading a free trial or that at certain times they offer a cheaper price, all basic sales procedure.

To answer Peter2150, I didn’t expect a discount; I just asked politely if they offered an upgrade to ShadowUser from the free ShadowSurfer. Many software products give a free version and then offer to upgrade to a fuller version, just of hand I can think of “Paragon/Acronis/PCTools/Ashampoo” all upgrade from the free to full versions, so I don’t think my message to StorageCraft asking *if* they did the same was anything out of the ordinary.

In regards to what I think a reasonable price would be I suggest you look at the opposition software products such as Paragon, and Acronis. Both these products offer a free version that can be upgraded to the latest full versions. As an example; my neighbour recently downloaded and registered Acronis TrueImage v7 that Acronis was offering for free, and then used this to upgrade to the latest version 10 for under US$30, that’s what I call a reasonable price.

Small note to the moderator; I’m sorry that my postings have caused a minor uproar; it wasn’t my intention to cause any ill feelings towards StorageCraft. I love their software and intend to keep my eye open for any special deals they might have for ShadowUser in the future. In the meantime I still thing the software is too expensive.

John.

 

@Kapiti: On behalf of StorageCraft, I apologize to you for the unsatisfactory email response that you received regarding upgrading your free ShadowSurfer license to a full ShadowUser license.

Regarding price comparisons, keep in mind that comparing ShadowUser to TrueImage is a meaningless comparison. These products have very little in common. ShadowSurfer/ShadowUser/ShadowServer is a sandbox app, while TrueImage is a backup app. StorageCraft's backup app is called ShadowProtect (not ShadowUser). But hey, who can keep all those ShadowXyz names straight anyway...

 

No worries, and I don't believe there's ongoing ill feelings, just some vigorous discussion, as there should be. We don't need to agree on all matters, or even any of the opinions I happen to have...

As an owner/occasional user of the product in question, I do agree. While the comparison to products such as True Image is, as pointed out by grnxnm, not quite apt, the $30 price point is basically on target with respect to the competitive commercial products out there.

Blue

 

1. Is this "without reboot" modification something a novice can do??

If so... how does one go about this??

 

Hi Pete,

When you back up with Shadow Protect are you active on your computer at the same time?

 

StorageCraft's ShadowProtect product supports full, differential, and incremental backups on live/active systems without the need to stop any of your applications or to interrupt your work. This capability is provided by StorageCraft's Volume Snapshot Manager which, in the course of being deployed over the years on tens of millions of machines, is now extremely efficient (fast) as well as reliable.

 

Yes, now I recall you saying you use the disk. Sorry, memory lapse.

 

Can A single user license for shadowuserpro, and/or shadowprotect be installed into different boot partitions or different VM clones on the same machine?

Ta

 

Cool.

I was thinking more perhaps of "free" VMServer with limited snapshots and Shadowuser.
Will the VM server do the snapback thing in its' one snapshot?

and:

Thx

 

For ShadowUser you're allowed to install it on your physical machine as well as any virtual machines on that physical machine. If you install it on another physical machine then you have to purchase an additional license.

I'm not sure about the ShadowProtect license policy. Is believe it is per-install rather than per-physical-machine.

 

grnxnhm
Thanks
Why the difference. ??
)Not that its too important: Shadowuser in VMWare may not be necessary imo ??)

Any bundling discounts yet heh.
Regards

 

I agree, I see no need for ShadowUser in VMware. Some users want to do this though, and we don't charge them if they want to.

 

Does that mean for any reason you have to reinstall this program you would have to pay again? Gosh, I hope not.

Rilla927

 

Yes, you are probably right.

 

No, of course not. Sorry, I can see I was confusing on this point. StorageCraft lost an enormous amount due to piracy of ShadowUser. When we released ShadowProtect we used much stricter license/activation technology, similar to Microsoft's stuff. If you have to re-install ShadowProtect you *may* be told that you have no remaining activations on your license key, and you'll have to contact support 'at' storagecraft.com and explain why you need to install again. They track this stuff, and valid requests are always allowed (increasing your available activations so that your online activation will succeed).

 

Ah, I get it now! Initially I couldn't figure out a valid use case for installing ShadowUser within a VM guest OS. ShadowUser works just fine within VMware (we use VMware a lot to test this stuff). Just try to keep things straight because yeah, if ShadowUser is installed on the VM guest OS then you can rollback within the VM guest OS (using ShadowUser) and also rollback using VMware itself.

A single user license of ShadowUser is good for, and can be used for, installations on any number of partitions/OSs/VMs on the same physical machine.

A single user license of ShadowProtect is good for one online-activation based installation. If you've wiped your machine, and need to reinstall ShadowProtect, we can usually determine at activation time, that you are installing on the same machine as before, and in this case (the most common case), as long as your hardware hasn't changed much, the product will activate without you needing to contact support 'at' storagecraft.com to obtain an activation credit. The only information communicated to StorageCraft at the time you activate is the information you enter in the registration dialog, along with a number which is a hashed value whose value is computed based on your current hardware configuration. It's basically the same method used by Microsoft.

 

Otherwise that sound fine.
Thx