Raxco Instant Recovery - Comparisons

A lot questions are popping up re the Raxco Instant programs. First a couple of basics

Raxco IR is an update of the old FDISR. Major enhancements are you can now install directly in Win 7/8 with out the fudges needed for FDISR. Better snapshot isolation. Faster.

Major differences between Instant Recovery and Instant Rescue.

Snapshots Recovery 10 Rescue 1
Archives Recovery yes Rescue no.

Okay so what is Instant Recovery

Snapshots are a bootable copy of your system. The snapshot can be a direct copy, or you can modify it.
By modify you can completely strip it down to bare essentials. You could have just a gaming snapshot. The downside to a lot of snapshots is disk space. They must reside on the C: drive

You can boot between snapshots from the GUI or, there is a preboot screen that comes in prior to the windows boot manager, and here you can interrupt the boot and choose the snapshot to boot into.

The preboot is NOT installed in the MBR. There is NO modification to the MBR.

Archives are off disk copies of a snapshot. They are not bootable, but need to be restored. Also you can't restore the archive of a snapshot while in that snapshot, you must be in another snapshot. You can have as many different archives as you want. Archives can be of the same snapshot but different points in time. The only limitation would be disk space as they are essentially the same size as the snapshot.

Another powerful feature is the ability to exclude files and or folders. More on the use of this later.

I am going to break this post here, and in the next post cover comparisons. Then in a third post I will do some of the ways I use it.

 

Post II

Comparison. A Caveat. I admit the bias, but will try to be factual.


1. Macrium is in my opinion the only 100% imaging program. It has incremental/differential capability and you can move chains of disk for storage. In essence giving it back and forth in time capability. Speed is excellent. My C: drive is 117gb. My machines are mid level gaming machines with 3 internal drives A full base image takes about 18 minutes. Incrementals take on average 2 minutes. Reliability is excellent. Images can be mounted and files and folders can be extracted.

2. AX64 TMv2. I personally don't consider it an imaging program. If it can't handle Perfect Disk, that flunks it for me. It uses Incrementals for being able to roll back and forth in time. It's forte is extremely fast incrementals, providing the tracking system isn't broken. Then the time reverts to the time of a full image. It uses image file format, and images can be mounted and files extracted.

3. Rollback Rx is a fast snapshot program. It works by storing new sectors on the disk, hidden from windows, and tracked by a filter driver. Biggest problem is if that filter is broken all snapshots are lost. Also images must be full sector, which can be huge. Problems with Rollback are documented well in this forum.

4. Raxco Instant Recovery. Uses file based snapshots stored on the c: drive. The snapshots are bootable. They can be changed from the original snapshot. Archives are the off disk copy. They are not bootable. Use of the archives for back and forth in time, as each point in time would take another archive. Archives can not be restored into their snapshot, so you restore archive a into snapshot a you must boot into snapshot b. To create a snapshot or archive on my machine from scratch takes about 40 minutes. To update them only takes about 2. IR is clearly not as efficient on disk space or time, but it just works. You can make unbelievable change then roll them back. Much quicker then restoring an image.

on to post 3 some of the uses I've made with it.

 

Post III

This is coming

 

That well maybe the case. I have a 1tb drive using only 117gb.

 

It may be tomorrow until Post 3

 

Yep, one of the catch 22's is to get to a stripped down snapshot you need the space to first copy the full one.

 

Okay here is Post 3

Uses of IR

1. The classic approach that Raxco is now selling. One just makes a 2nd complete snapshot. That's it. Then keep it current with copy update. The idea is you work normally and if disaster strikes, you just boot into the other snapshot, and continue working. My sager laptop is set up this way. What I do is say I am going to do windows update. I refresh the other snapshot, and just let windows update run. Then if there is a problem, I boot to the other snapshot, and refresh the main one undoing the update This undoing is much faster then an image restore. Simple and effective.

2. The way I use it. I only have a secondary snapshot, that after first creating it, I stripped it way down. I also created two archives, of my Primary snapshot, and one of my Seconday snapshot. How do I use these. Normally I keep the two archives update and the same. But say I want to do some major test, uninstall something, and install some new major piece of software. If I don't like it, I boot to the secondary snapshot, and restore from the archive to the primary. That puts the system back like it was. Sometime, if I want to play with the configuration a bit longer, I may save it in one of the archives. That way go back to the original and come back to the new. Each change is much quicker then a full image restore.

Some of the things I've done.

1. Tested using it for image replacement. I wiped my drive, then reinstalled windows. Didn't even activate. Then installed FDISR(or IR). Immediately restored my secondary archive, creating a secondary snapshot. Booted to the secondary, and restored the primary. When I booted back to the primary my system was back like I started. True it took a lot longer then an image restore, but it worked.

2. A real life example of FDISR/IR bailing me out of a bad fix. I did something I shouldn't have done, and didn't realize I had a corruption on the disk, and also it had corrupted a chain of incrementals. The disk corruption was manifested by a folder that even chkdsk could get rid of or fix. I thought of using FDISR/IR to try and fix it, but was, correctly it turned out, told that to fix the disk structure problem, I needed to either install windows fresh, or restore an image. Problem was because of what happened the only image I had was a year old. Arrg.

So what I ended up doing, was creating a new FDISR/IR archive, and using the exclude function, keep the corrupt folder out of the archive. Then I restored the year old image. It already had FDISR installed, so I first restored the archive of the secondary to get it current. Booted to the secondary, and restored the primary. Voila problem solved, disk good as new.

That exclude function is unique and can be a gem.


Pete

 

Alex hopefully this last post will help. Yes it appears there are downsides. But there is a big trust factor. I used the warm restore, and it never failed me, but I never trusted it enough to not have a macrium incremental backing me up.

Also it claimed to be an imaging program but still really isn't. That doesn't leave me trusting the whole thing. I think even though released, TMv2 is still in beta. Ask yourself, why did they start selling a program that wasn't ready.

Finally it comes down to my faith and trust in the vendor. Raxco has proven itself. Go to the Raxco site and look at their list of corporate clients. These are people they have already earned trust from. Without enterprise type clients do you think AX64 will survive?

To do what I do with my systems, I have to have 100% faith in the vendor. I do with Raxco.

 

Alex, one of the bottom line answers to why IR over XA64 TMv2, can be found in the last few posts in the AX64 thread. Reliability. I go back to 2006 with FDISR, and it has never let me down. I have 100% trust in both IR and Raxco. I can't say the same for AX64. I agree with the person who said they are selling an Alpha release.

 

You can add Image for Windows to the list. Raxco did tell me if you use Acronis you will have to turn off pre boot.

 

Hi Alex

I did a lot of testing with AX64, and RIR. It does work, but most of time it messed up the tracking file, so any time saving was gone. Let me go back an amplify some of the differences.

In RIR Snapshots are bootable copy of you logical c: drive. The must be on the physical c: drive. Each snapshot will increase the size of an image so to many of them isn't good

Archives are non bootable copies of a snapshot.

Both snapshots and archives can be updated by a copy operation. Lets define something. On your disk you have two snapshots, one called Primary and one called Secondary. Then on either an other disk or external drive, you can create an Archive of either or both snapshots. In this example we will just use the Secondary snapshot as a place to boot from, so we strip down so it can just boot windows. This keeps disk space down. So are primary working units are the Primary Snapshot and Primary Archive.

Okay so now we want to test a piece of software. First we make sure our Primary archive is current, by doing a copy operation to update the archive. Then we install the software to test it. If we like it and want to keep it, we just update the archive, so now the software is in the archive. But if we don't want to keep the software, we boot to the secondary snapshot, restore the Primary Archive to the Primary Snapshot, and then boot back to the Primary Snapshot, and the new software is completely gone.

This might seem more complicated then AX64, and in a way it is. But with V1, you have two options, hot restore, or recovery CD. So the question is how much do you trust them?

pete