Alternative to True Image (nervous nellie)

Hi longboard, Thanks for the link.

 

@autokilo

That's correct, during the creation of a new differential image, ShadowProtect performs a CRC32 check on all of the data in the existing image files upon which the new differential image file is dependent. This CRC32 check is transparent in successful cases, but if errors are found then they will be visible in the log and the generation of the new differential image file will fail. The CRC32 value is used on data portions of the image file. Other methods are used to validate integrity of the image file's own metadata. Therefore you can't simply extract this CRC32 value and use your own CRC32 checker on the image file. In retrospect that would have been cool, but alas, it's not possible with the current image file format. I was able to obtain permission to release a verification tool before the next major version release (SP2 is not a major version release - not a 3.0 release). I believe ShadowProtect V.2 SP2 is releasing on Friday. We'll release the verification tool shortly after that (within a week or so). CRC32 checks are performed during the entire restore process. If all is OK, at the end of the restore the log will indicate that CRC32 tests passed.

 

Thanks grnxnm, let us know when the release and tool are available.

Two more questions (sorry ^_^)

1) when making a backup of the system partition, how does ShadowProtect handle the fact that the system partition is still in use and changing while the backup is made? (With IFD, they have a utility called Phylock).

I noticed in the summary at the end of the backup wizard, there is mention of a "lock" but I don't see any options during the wizard or in the settings that allows this to be turned on.

2) regarding licensing, did you find out anything from your sales team as to what a licensed user of ShadowProtect Desktop is entitled to? I assume minor releases are thrown in but what about the major releases? Would users get the next major upgrade for free or at some discount?

 

Regarding question 1: ShadowProtect uses StorageCraft's own snapshot device driver to backup in-use volumes. This snapshot driver is licensed by many companies for use in their own products and has been widely deployed (over 5 years on tens of millions of computers) and is extremely robust. If you don't want to use the snapshot driver (there's no reason not to, honestly) you can attempt to lock the volume (as you noticed the wizard supports this option). Locking will only work for data volumes (non-OS volumes, and volumes that don't contain pagefile). The "lock" that you see in the log is a lock of the snapshot device, and not your actual drive. Don't worry, unless you explicitly specify that you want to use lock, your volumes will NOT be locked (snapshot will be used and the snapshot device itself will be locked, which has no effect upon your actual volume).

Regarding question 2: When version 3 comes out you will be able to upgrade from a previous version to version 3 for around 50% of the cost. If you purchase version 2 now, and pay for "maintenance", which costs about 20% more, then you will automatically receive, free of cost, all new versions of the product (including major versions) over the next year.

 

grnxnm from memory you said that the next version of ShadowP Desktop will include uni restore.

Can you give a rough outline when this version might ship?

 

The "restore to anywhere" feature (or whatever marketing will end up calling it) will be available in the ShadowProtect recovery environment in about a month (released to market). The code is complete, although it's in Alpha stage, so we're still working out the kinks.

If you will PM me your email address, I'll forward it to our beta test team and they'll put you on the list to be a beta tester (if you're interested) of this feature. I believe the feature will be ready for beta in about two weeks (give or take).

 

I had an interesting conversation with Howard today and I thought I'd mention one thing that we discussed which may be of use to anyone who uses ShadowProtect, Ghost, True Image, or any similar product with incremental capability on a multi-OS-boot system.

Typically, when you install a snapshot-based imaging product, a snapshot device driver is installed along with the product. If you're generating incremental images, then this feature is often supported by the snapshot driver which keeps track of the sectors that have changed since the previous full/incremental backup. When you shutdown your system, this change list is serialized to disk and reloaded on boot. If you boot to another OS, on which the snapshot driver is not installed, and make changes to a volume on which this "incremental tracking" is being performed, the tracking will not occur within this other OS environment, and so when you boot back to the original OS and generate a new incremental, it won't be a good incremental.

So, generally speaking, follow this guideline: If you use snapshot-based incremental backup on a multi-boot system, only create full/differential images, but never incremental images. Data integrity is key.

 

Ayup!

See http://forums.hardwareguys.com/ikonboard.cgi?s=4492619c5fa1ffff;act=ST;f=13;t=4573.

 

Does not apply to True Image.

 

As a FDISR-user, I always take full image backups and my restorations never failed during six months. ATI was exciting in the beginning, now it bores me. FDISR is versatile and more fun.

 

Wow, that's very interesting! That, combined with the evidence that TI's incremental performance degrades very quickly when you make a lot of changes to your volume from one incremental to the next, strongly suggests that TI's internal implementation for their "incremental" feature is actually an abbreviated differential implementation. There are pros and cons to this. The pros are that it won't have issues with multi-boot environments. The cons are that performance will be very poor for backup jobs that perform incrementals on high-load servers. Hence the product is poorly suited for enterprise servers, but for multi-OS-boot end users it has a distinct advantage (if they want dependable (theoretically) incremental capability and also want to boot to multi OSs).

 

When I first started using TI 9 earlier this year, a full backup took only a few minutes longer than with Ghost 10.

At some point this year, TI made a major change and the performance of incremental backups improved significantly, but, at least on my system, FULL TI backups take about an hour longer than FULL Ghost 10 backup.

TI bases the incremental/differential on the particular base FULL backup used, so TI cannot really use a sector tracking mechanim.

I'll accept longer backups to avoid the overhead of sector tracking.
Often a full backup does not take much longer than a differential/incremental.
I oft run several backups per day.

With TI, I do differential backups on the two larger USB drives. I do FULL Backups on the smaller two USB drives, otherwise there would not be enough space to save both the Ghost a TI backups. Occasionally, I'll slip in a TI incremental on the small USB drives.

With Ghost 10, on all USB drives, I use only Independent Recovery Sets, each of which is always a full backup.

 

This is a bit off topic, but I wanted to publicly thank the members of this forum for their feedback so far on ShadowProtect. During the last two weeks the feedback from this forum has directly contibuted to two bugs being fixed (corner cases, yet very important fixes - thanks Howard and HuntNYC for reporting these!), as well as several ideas being considered and some incorporated into the next major version. It's great to work with experienced users who put your product through the ringer.

 

FYI, Image file data integrity verification capability, as a separate tool, will be available in ShadowProtect Ver. 2 Service Pack 2 which will be available in a few days. At this time verification is a command-line tool. We're creating a GUI for it but thought you guys would like to have it as soon as possible rather than wait for the cosmetic dressing.

That being said, ShadowProtect has always performed image file verification, transparently, whenever a restore is performed, using CRC32. What we're doing now is adding a separate verification tool so that users can also verify their images without restoring them.

 

ShadowProtect SP2 now available...

Service Pack 2 for ShadowProtect Desktop/Server Editions is now available here:

Desktop Edition:
http://www.storagecraft.com/downloads/SPDesktop_Setup_SP2.exe

Server Edition:
http://www.storagecraft.com/downloads/SPServer_Setup_SP2.exe

If you have already installed ShadowProtect, and the version you installed is greater or equal to 2.0.1.8 (SP1), then you can simply install SP2 over it (no need to uninstall your current installation) and SP2 will make the appropriate patches. If you have a version of ShadowProtect prior to 2.0.1.8 (SP1) then you need to fully uninstall your older version of ShadowProtect before installing SP2. If you upgrade SP1 to SP2 and have already activated SP1, your activation will remain intact.

If you requested an Evaluation version of ShadowProtect, then the download link in the email you received will automatically point to the latest version of the recovery environment ISO image file for SP2.

If you purchased the product from the StorageCraft store, then you must contact sales 'at' storagecraft.com to obtain the latest version of the product. This weekend a download page will be added for store for existing customers to obtain updates without the need to contact us. New customers who purchase the product through the store will automatically receive SP2. VAR customers must contact us directly at sales 'at' storagecraft.com, or wait for the update download page to be added this weekend.

Some of the changes/fixes in SP2:

-Fixed the occasional hang of our NT Service, ShadowProtectSvc.exe
-Fixed memory leaks in ShadowProtectSvc.exe
-Resolved memory leaks in Microsoft's VSS components for Windows
Server 2003 (a private hotfix from Microsoft, KB923628 must be applied
to resolve this issue - we still have outstanding support incidents with
Microsoft to resolve similar memory leaks in their VSS components on XP)
-Fixed snapshot failures on Windows 2000 during high disk activity
-Fixed a BSOD that occurs under extremely rare conditions
-Fixed a number of GUI issues such as a hang in the GUI if certain
large-font desktop themes are in use.
-Fixed bugs in our installer. From SP2 onward, you will be able to patch
your current install (no full uninstall of previous version necessary). Also
your settings will be preserved from the old version to the updated version.
-Fixed a bug that was causing the Quick Mount to fail under certain conditions
-Fixed a bug in the recovery environment in which new partitions created
by the recovery environment weren't normalized (their order on in the partition
table wasn't necessary their order on disk - technically not incorrect but
not friendly to other storage tools).
-Added 30+ storage drivers to the Recovery Environment
-Added image file data integrity verification capability

SP1 is Product Version: 2.0.1.8
SP2 is Product Version: 2.0.1.35

There are two minor issues that I know of in SP2.

1) If you use the VerifyImage.cmd script to verify an image, it will only work on base/full images. You can still verify the integrity of incremental image files but you have to do it using the sbrun.exe tool with the following syntax (this example will verify the integrity of a base plus two incrementals):

sbrun.exe -mdn ( sbset "D:\Backups\C_VOL-b001.spf" "D:\Backups\C_VOL-b001-i001.spi" "D:\Backups\C_VOL-b001-i002.spi" : sbrest )

or, in general, the syntax is this:

sbrun.exe -mdn ( sbset "PathToFullSPFImage" "PathToFirstSPIIncremental" "PathToNextSPIIncremental" : sbrest )

Note that spaces *must* be used to separate the '(' ')' and ':' characters in the above command line.

2) If you set up a scheduled backup, and as the schedule executes a backup if the backup takes <= 1 second (incrementals are so fast for seldomly-used volumes that it's very common in fact for ShadowProtect to complete an incremental backup in < 1 second), the job status view doesn't always show the correct output image filename (it doesn't always refresh - it'll show an older file name). Don't worry, the job has executed properly and created the proper new incremental file, verifiable in your output directory as well as in the history.

Both of these issues have been fixed since we made our SP2 build. No software is perfect, and there comes a point where you simply have to draw the line and say "at this point we have enough goodness to release an update." We have since resolved these issues, and I understand that they will be available in a future update prior to version 3. However, like I said earlier, they are very minor issues and don't affect any of the core functionality of the product whatsoever. I just thought I'd give you guys a heads-up.

Finally, we have done away with the Trial version of ShadowProtect. It was too confusing to users that we had both a Trial and an Evaluation version. The download links above are to the evaluation version. They do not, however, point to the ISO for the recovery environment. To obtain that you must still submit an Evaluation request form at:

Desktop Edition Evaluation Recovery Environment ISO Request Form:

http://www.storagecraft.com/products/ShadowProtectDesktop/Desktopedevalrequest.asp

Server Edition Evaluation Recovery Environment ISO Request Form:

http://www.storagecraft.com/products/ShadowProtectServer/Serveredevalrequest.asp

 

Re: ShadowProtect SP2 now available...

The links point to SP2. n'est-ce pa?
THe desktop download is a bit under 10MB.
The Evaluation version was about 96MB.

 

Yes, those download links are to the fully-functional Evaluation version of ShadowProtect Desktop/Server Editions, version 2, Service Pack 2.

They point to the 10MB installers for the product, but not to the ISO for the recovery environment. If you would like to try out the recovery environment, you must request this evaluation by submitting an online form (links provided at the bottom of the above message).

 

Been busy with lots of things. Finally had a chance to try out SP2 over the last 3-4 days.

Ran into problems with the installation and running the application. This was due to do with the fact that I had disabled two windows services which ShadowProtect Desktop depends on - MS Software Shadow Copy Provider and Volume Shadow Copy - which should be Manual.

I've informed grnxnm about these, so hopefully these problems won't be encountered in the next release.

On SP2, everything seems as the last release. Backing up is accurate and quick. 10gb (two partitions) takes under 3 minutes. Binary difference of backup against the drives is accurate.

Verify seems to work. It's pretty quick but I've not had a chance to use a hex editor to make a backup corrupt. Hopefully someone else can test that...

Just restored both drives after trashing my computer a bit (after spending a good while getting everything just like i wanted it). Restore took about 4 minutes to restore all 10gb. Binary difference against mounted images was accurate and system is back to pre-trashed state.

So far so good.

 

Everything fine here also. Now, when I run the advanced option (Number 2) AS THE rECOVERY cd (FROM NEW iso) boots up, it now see my internal SATA drives and restores to my USB 2.0 external drive at the righ speed, fast. I am loving this program so far and look forward to future developement of it. Imagain and restore times are fast and accurate.

Gary

 

as per OP: found this: From Phoenix the hardware manufacturers
http://tinyurl.com/c3z2y
Dont think this has been mentioned before.
Review here:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/06/20/firstware_recover_pro_2004/page2.html

Some caveats for full "off disc" restore, cant save to USB or external HD, (options supposed to be coming soon), seems more of an "Instant recovery" option, but has some good features if any one interested.

LBD

 

We're working on your nvraid.sys issue. It'd be a no brainer if NVIDIA would just follow the same convention used by all of the other storage device drivers.... but alas, they had to be mavericks. You already know this, but I thought I'd let the forum know, that in the process of working on support for Pete's hardware controller, in our recovery environment, we have figured out a way to support virtually all of the 3rd party controllers out there (you'll pretty much never have to hit F6 or hunt for that miniport driver diskette - this is also important for those folks who don't have a floppy drive). It's taking some time to implement this feature but I think it will be well worth it.

 

Been reading through this megathread and am now more confused.

Whats the conclusion on the best Image software.
I only care about full boot partition image...