ShadowProtect continuous incrementals

How does this actually work? Does it use a lot of resources? My new system has AMD 8350 8-cores and 32GB RAM. I would like to have continuous backups if possible and minimal downtime. Or would it be best to just use RAID 1 SSD's for OS?

 

Thank you very much for your explanation. I appreciate. Great to hear it only takes a short time for the incrementals.

 

Peter, I dabbled with that a few years ago but then went back to a simplified way of using incrementals (3 times a day) with 6 full images on a weekly basis to be retained.
If I remember correctly, for continuous incrementals and automatic conversion to dailies, weeklies and monthlies, do you need to use a specific function or module?

 

All of my drives are GPT. The Disk Map in SP shows each drive with a 127MB "Unrecognized/unknown" partition. My Win8 boot drive has a Recovery volume, No Label *.\ volume 96MB FAT32, and a No Label *:\ 128MB partitions on it. Shadowprotect backup status on those partitions is "failed, incrementals not supported on this volume", snapshot destroyed.

So on my GPT boot drive, all I need to backup is my Recovery and C: partitions?
Why are these other partitions unrecognized?

 

mhob,

In Disk Management, are either of these partitions described as "EFI System Partition"?

 

See screenshots.

 

mhob,

The two partitions you mentioned are the EFI System Partition and the Microsoft Reserved Partition. The latter partition is present on every GPT drive but it doesn't show in Disk Management. The former contains your booting files.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/gg463525.aspx

 

There shouldn´t be any problem to back up the EFI System Partition, it´s a FAT partition. The MSR partition can only be backed up in "sector by sector" or raw mode. Perhaps this mode isn´t supported in incremental backups.

 

I asked the same questions on Storagecraft forums, and they responded with the following. Hopefully this information will help someone else too, in the future.

 

mhob,

Did the forum say how to backup and restore the EFI System Partition and the MSR?

Edit.... Which SP version do you own?

 

That's all they said in that quote. I havent replied back to them yet. I own SP 5 Desktop.

 

OK, because that quote doesn't apply to a UEFI system.

 

Yeah, it's interesting that their support can't give a clear answer. All I want, is to create a full backup image of drive C:, of all partitions. What good is backup software, if it can't read some of those system partitions? They make it sound like that if I ever have to restore, that their software only restores C: and not the other partitions.

I tried O&O DiskImage, and what it does is take a "forensic" backup of those system partitions and adds it to the backup image. Why can't SP do this?

 

So on their forums, I found this post:

http://www.storagecraft.com/support/forum/gpt-disks-and-shadow-protect

So it looks like SP is not quite UEFI/GPT ready. I need to be able to make drive C: bootable after a crash and restore ALL partitions, not just C:. Since SP can't do this, what do you suggest?

 

One approach is to clone the UEFI boot disk in "sector by sector" mode. This can be done with Paragon HDM 12.

You can also use Partition Wizard. The latest 7.8 version can "copy UEFI boot disk", http://www.partitionwizard.com/.

See also http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?98113-Cloning-a-GPT-Drive.

It seems that in either case the cloned disk must be "repaired" after the clone operation to make it bootable. Paragon warns about this (and the above link confirms it). The repair can be done with the Paragon program or a Windows repair disk.

Another approach using Paragon would be to create an image of the whole disk, also in sector by sector (or "raw") mode.

I haven't´ tried these procedures, but I am planning to do so soon in a new Lenovo laptop with Windows 7.

 

Robin,

I'm not so sure about the Raw mode imaging. You can just image the EFI System partition, the MSR partition and the OS partition conventionally and restore them to a new drive. At least you can with IFW.

Edit... IFW automatically updates the EFI System partition (during a restore to a new drive) so a startup repair isn't needed.

 

Good, that´s another alternative. To create a normal (used sectors only) image and restore it to a new disk to recover an UEFI system. Perhaps it doesn´t matter if the MSR is corrupted in the process, Windows can recover it as long as it´s present. I´ll try this method.

Paragon can also update the EFI partition to make the disk bootable, as long as the operation is done with a 64-bit WinPE. This isn´t automatic, an option ("Switch EFI to boot from destination drive") must be selected. If a 32-bit medium is used, this option doesn´t appear and the repair must be done manually after the restore.

 

On the SP forum, I was told I only need to backup C: partition, and not the MS Reserved nor EFI partitions. They said the SP restore CD would recreate those partitions. I hope so.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/gg463525.aspx
http://i.msdn.microsoft.com/dynimg/IC496549.jpg

 

mhob,

That's OK if you just have an OS issue and you need to restore a C: drive image to the same HD. But if you have a HD failure you need to restore all partitions to the new HD. So you must have backup images of all partitions.

 

Thats what I thought too, since the EFI contains boot information. The full backup does backup all partitions successfully on the OS boot drive. The problem is with incrementals and the continuous incrementals.

I created a scheduled backup job with continuous incrementals. On Sunday, it creates a full backup. Other days, it is scheduled for continuous incrementals of all partitions, but these fail. So the whole backup job is flagged as "failed", even though C: partition is successfully. ShadowProtect says you only need to backup the EFI, Windows Reserved partitions once every 6 months or so. Is that correct? On a GPT disk, where is the FAT table stored, on partition C with the OS?

 

Sounds reasonable. Three small partitions to backup every 6 months.