Introducing AX64 Time Machine - hybrid imaging/snapshot software

Thanks Zero3k, if possible, please send us the logs along with the description you've posted here.

To send logs, open beta 2 AX64, click on backup tools, then on the about icon. Here you can export logs. Please attach it to a mail and shoot it off to us via the website.

Thanks

 

How would logs be able to help fix something that Windows 7 itself is doing because of Time Machine? I think that explorer somehow "crashes" which causes it to reset the registry entry dealing with how the System Tray Icons are customized.

 

Zero3K, logs help a lot. Without getting too technical, they provide tons of information regarding AX64's behaviour in the context of your whole PC. It is a standard procedure that can give us a lot of insight into your PC's configuration and helps us identify and diagnose the issues. Whether big or small.

 

Ok. I sent you the requested email.

 

Hi Norman,

We have re-produced this issue and it has been fixed in our in-house build. This fix along with others will be released in Beta 3.

Thanks!

 

Hi Waj

Hope that you are well? Been trying the latest beta (finally took the plunge and uninstalled PD...LOL) and whilst the install went very well I just could not get the beta to take a manual backup. Went through all the motions as I would expect but when I clicked the button to start it...NADA...Time Machine showed no sign of life in terms of preparing the disk for backup, indicating hat it was doing anything at all...most frustrating. I have uninstalled and will reinstall again over the weekend...but if that does not work then I will have to await the next beta offering.

BTW...very much like the GUI...very classy IMHO.

Have a great weekend.

Regards, Baldrick

 

Days? Weeks? Months? Years (sorry, I'm an oldtime Rollback user)?

Norman

 

Aiming for end of the coming week. (Definitely not weeks)

 

Hi Baldrick,

Please report your issue to our support email. If you can, reinstall, recreate the issue, go to the backup tools tab, click on about and export logs.

It sounds like the driver was not installed correctly. Do make sure if you are installing this from v1,you must fully uninstall v1 first.

Also, if you're willing to wait, we will have a beta 3 towards the end of next week that will allow the install of PD!

Thanks Baldrick

 

"some" means not all so we should have the choice to override the blocking during installation. anyway people know what are they doing when they choose to override it.

 

Hi Waj

Thanks for the response...much appreciated. I did carry out an uninstall of v1, followed by a reboot but it is possible that it was not clean. I will be retrying the same again today, hopefully, and will certainly make sure that I grab & provide logs if the issue manifests itself again.

Great news about Beta 3...I would actually like to keep the v2 beta on my system to run more permanently (like I did when we were alpha & beta testing v1 way back) as that is a better simulation/test of usage...and when I don't have to uninstall PD and then reinstall it...that will be perfect.

Will be in touch if I can reproduce the issue, if not then I will wait patiently for Beta 3.

Cheers


Baldrick

 

In beta 3, we will be allowing users to install programs that are not 100% compatible - but we will give a warning.

 

That will be nice, thanks.

 

Just a word about the speed of warm restores - yesterday I restored a 3 day old backup using warm restore and it took about 25 minutes, most of that between 0-20% of the restore, while the last 80% was fairly quick. A full image restore (restoring 216gb) takes about 40 minutes on my laptop. Given that there were only about 3 gb of changes over those 3 days, I'm surprised at the length of time it took to warm restore. I'm restoring the backup from a second HDD in my laptop (750gb,7200rpm) to a Vertex 4 512gb SSD, running Windows 8.1 on a HP Envy 17 3200.

Other than that, I'm very happy with this software.

 

Reposed, I ran your test on my W8.1 test system, SSD and a USB3 snapshot storage element (WD Green <5900-7200rpm>). I used both the HOT restore and the WARM restore to move back and forth across about 3-days (2.6gB) of changes and the two results (other than the WARM restore's BOOT into WinPE) were identical in both directions at about 3.5-min.

I think something else was going on when you did your restores (FULL...? Maybe much older than 3-days?). 3gB should never take 25-min to WARM restore from a 7200rpm HDD to an SSD unless the restore process found significant differences between the system states and decided to do a FULL (or almost FULL) instead.

 

I have similar issues - not sure if you can answer any of the following questions:

Are there pauses during the restore process? Does restoring to 10 minutes ago take less time than to 3 days ago? How long does a full, non-incremental restore take?

I ask because I used to get pauses due to a bios power saving issue, suspect that the further I go back, the longer it takes, and full restores are relatively quick.

 

To test it again, I decided to go back to a backup done 70 minutes beforehand. The computer had been sitting idle over that period as I was elsewhere. So no user changes were made but AV updates, Google drive sync etc may have occurred. Anyway, I think there is definitely an issue here as it took 12 minutes 16 seconds from beginning of recovery in the restore environment to 100% recovered before reboot. Given that very little had changed in an hour as the computer was sitting idle, 12 plus minutes seems a lot of time for restoring those changes.

I'm definitely doing warm restores as the restore percentage incremental are not consistent as they would be in a full restore (i.e 1%-5% may take 5 minutes, then it will race to 12% in 2 seconds then slow down again etc)

I'm going to now create a restore point and restore to it immediately and see what happens.

 

Okay, I created a restore point and restored to it immediately. 5 minutes 49 seconds to warm restore no changes? Timings were taken from the beginning of restore within the rebooted recovery environment, until it hit 100% before rebooting out of recovery.

 

Can you do the same thing once again (RESTORE point with an immediate return to that point) except use the HOT RESTORE function?

 

Reposed, if you find little difference using the HOT RESTORE, I would run ATTO on both your SSD and your snapshot storage element to see if you're having an internal bandwidth issue... those timings are just too slow.

 

Immediate Hot Restore after backup = 3 minutes 20 seconds - so quicker. Below are the disk benchmarks for C: (SSD) and D: (7500rpm spindle). They look pretty normal to me.

 

Thanks Reposed - I have very similar symptoms.

Does anybody know that with the current beta if I were to rename my 'My Backups' folder, create a new baseline for testing, then once done delete the new folder and rename the old one again, will it pick up where it left off or will it force a new baseline? I'm asking as I have a long chain I don't want to lose immediate access too.

 

Taotoo... what you describe will indeed cause a new BASELINE to be generated following your test environment (tested and proven). I personally don't understand why but I'm not an AXTM imaging developer.

With AXTM, imaging decisions are based on the status of the current tracking file and the last (if it's a snapshot) or reference (if it's a restore) tracking file saved accordingly. The "current" tracking file does not change (always reflects current system status since TM installation) unless the app is unINSTALLed, therefore it should be a valid reference at any time during operations since the original app installation... and against any folder of snapshots. This view might be a bit parochial but it should be valid.

Pete's advice on # of incrementals is very sage... the more you have to deal with, the longer the restore will be. Personally, I don't understand why folks need "lots" of snapshots. System statuses prior to test modes are very valid to have, but once the test is complete, they may be discarded. System configurations that users may be going back to for use are valid to keep on hand... but just about everything else can be deleted ("merged" in the TM environment), except maybe the baseline or some timely ones along the way (weekly maybe). My "timely" ones are done with a secondary imaging app... Macrium, since Pete forced me to try it