I'm trying this thing out, as Rollback rx just blew up, and on rebooting My PC The your computer needs to be repaired screen came up, and basically I had to do an image restore from an external drive. So anyway, on looking at Farstone's website, apparently this thing has a Hotkey restore on boot up ? but I'm damned if I can find which key> or even If it's actually working right>? on Windows 8.1
RestoreIT creates very large buffer files at the root of your C: drive. If you also use an imaging program to do differentials or incrementals, the resulting image will always be big and take a while because of those buffer files.
Most imaging software lets you exclude files by their extension, so it is possible to exclude the RestoreIt buffer files from the backup. Cheers manolito
It remains to be tested when, upon a restore, this will break RestoreIT's boot console and therefore render your system unbootable.
Acronis True Image and Paragon Backup & Recovery Free sure do... @ MarcP The RestoreIT boot console is integrated into the BCD store, the MBR is not altered. Any imaging software can backup and restore this. Cheers manolito
So let me be sure I understand. I can take an image(as opposed to file and folder backup) exclude a folder, so then if I do an image restore, that folder will be gone?
No, you cannot exclude folders, but you can specify file extensions for excluding. All files with these extensions will not be backed up in an image based backup (I am not talking about a files and folders based backup). The RestoreIT buffer files all have the same extension, so it is easy to exclude them. Of course this means that after restoring from such a backup all RestoreIT snapshots will be gone. Cheers manolito
Ooooo, not sure that I like that. A mirror image should be exactly that, an exact mirror. The only change that I accept is excluding empty space. If you restore an image missing certain things you could have a real mess on your hands, for example, other programs depending upon those excluded thingies. Acadia
So you also think that the swap file and the hibernation file should never be excluded from an image backup? If a user decides to exclude files by their extension, it certainly helps if he knows what he is doing. But I really cannot see why I should not exclude files with extensions like .bak, .tmp, .~ from my image backups. Cheers manolito
Apps like Macrium and Shadowprotect include place holders for the swap file, and I suspect the hibernation file. But the aren't actually in the image. As to the others, clean up first and then image.
