Introducing AX64 Time Machine - hybrid imaging/snapshot software

Hi,
Thanks to all, sorry for creating confusion between all these products. I just wanted to know whether these 2 were compatible. I have currently some issues with AXTM and no answer yet from the support service, I keep rebuilding my backup chain on a regular basis...

 

Hi all

For me, I have been forced to relegate AX64 to an old Advent machine purely to test the Application as AXTM seems to be going nowhere! Like Pete, I am very, very happy with Raxco's Instant Recovery with Macrium Reflect.

 

Thank you, much appreciated.

 

Mr. Frog, are you really not in their payroll?
I think you should ask them to put you in

 

Hi all,
I am happy to report I seem to have solved an issue with TM V2 (all recent builds) : for no obvious reason, snapshots would freeze at random since a few days. I tried to revert build 499 and 528 to no avail. I finally decided to delete a lot of intermediate snapshots, they were merged correctly. Since that "purge" operation, snapshot start to complete fine again. But I don't use automatic backups any longer.
Hope this can help.

 

MerleOne... something like what you describe above would surely lead me to doing some health checking on the drive that's storing your snapshots.

 

Well, if you remember I used to be the "Virtual VP of Marketing" a while back (in the Isso days), but the pay (@ $.52/hr) was not quite up to snuff so I had to sign up for Social Security here in the USA. The pay, now, is a little better but not very much

 

Thanks, I think I already checked that. HardDisk Sentinel which is monitoring this drive reports no anomaly whatsoever, a regular chkdsk gives no error and and a fast scan with HDtune neither. And no other imaging software used on this PC ever exhibits the same freezes. I forgot to mention these freezes also occurred when I used another external drive as snapshot destination.

 

I’ve been using TM 2.0.0.499 for just over a month on Windows 7 64 bit system. All backups have been AUTO – never did a manual backup, and had no reason to do a restore until last night. After installing a buggy piece of software earlier in the day, I decided to do a warm restore to 12:00 noon yesterday. I am now back up and running and all appears good.
My question now is, when looking at the backup browser, the little green arrow points to the time of the restore (ie. 12 noon). There are 9 incremental hourly backups after this which I assume will contain the buggy software. Should I delete these backups? I have turned off AUTO until I know what I should do with them.

 

Personaly, I would delete the 9 unwanted hourly backups from within windows if you need to keep the backup chain prior to 12 noon, then do a manual backup in TM and turn Auto backup back on. Or you could delete the whole backup folder and start again, I do this every couple of weeks. Rename the old backup folder first if you want to keep the snapshots.

 

Hi Jopa66! Some things to consider...

Now that you have "rolled back," you are on a new time line which, from here on out, will become independent. The 9 INCREMENTAL time slices mentioned above now become isolated and on their own. At this point they only have a REFERENCE function, not an ongoing timeline function. By that I mean a place to go back to, or more important, a place to gather files from if those files aren't in the new timeline you've returned to. Other than that, they are useless.

If you really have no use for them anymore, they can be deleted in (2) ways. The method mentioned by K1C above will work fine as long as those time slices are never to be used again and are not in an ACTIVE timeline. Deleting time slices using Windows Explorer is very much discouraged with this application, especially slices that are still in the LIVE timeline (it'll break the INCREMENTAL system). The best way to do this and keep Time Machine aware of all your activity is to use the DELETE function in Time Machine's BROWSER. Starting with the last time slice in the old 9-slice section, delete them one by one back to the slice you returned to. This DELETE action will still try and do a MERGE, but when it sees there's no current timeline slice to merge into it just deletes the one you asked it to... the operation is very quick. This way, Time Machine is always aware of what you're trying to do... and if your operation is a bit unorthodox, TM will surely tell you. Deleting with Windows Explorer is done without TM's knowledge and in some cases can be a bit dangerous as far as the integrity of your backup chain is concerned.

 

MerleOne, freezing snaps scares me a bit. Normally a snap process requires nothing more than the tracking file from the previous snap and the current LIVE tracling file... that's how it determines what to put in the next incremental snapshot. With "freezing," it sounds like it didn't matter what the last snap was, it would still freeze.

I might consider starting a whole new timeline since I wouldn't have a good feeling as to what actually was MERGEd prior to your success.

 

Thanks Froggie. That's pretty much what I had planned to do, just didn't know the reasoning for it or if it would break the chain. The fact that TM knows to isolate them is good news. I will delete them after a quick browse to check for anything important.

 

Thanks for your suggestions. Actually, since the " purge", all backup have completed fine. I have yet to trial a final test : mount some snapshot and run chkdsk on the mounted snapshot to see if everything looks fine. With AX64 TM V2 (adn V1), this is painfully slow (the chkdsk).

 

When I went to just now recover a backup I was informed the 'bitmap' was invalid and that I had to do a backup. I had a days worth of backups already stored so..........I have not seen this error before. Version 2.0.0.439 Win 7/64. Any thoughts?

 

Did you try using the latest build, 528 ?

 

No. I have not been feeling very good about these "improvments".

 

I was just asking because sometimes bugs do get ironed out.

 

Thank you for responding MerleOne. Yes, and sometimes bugs get ironed in.

 

True, and this is how they are found. Collected logs and an e-mail to support with logs attached would be appreciated by all I am sure.

 

Needed to do a restore today, received this message when attempting to do a warm restore. Had to use the rescue disk to do a cold restore, this software doesn't fill me with a great deal of confidence. Using version 528.