Alternative to True Image (nervous nellie)

Here's the explanation of "A" and "T" from the IFD manual.

 

@grnxnm

I haven't tried this yet.
But obviously not a simple proceedure.

? Symantec live state recovery supposedly will work ??expensive
There have been some good threads at radified forums re universal restore
http://radified.com/cgi-bin/YaBB/YaBB.cgi?board=general;action=display;num=1146045354
UltraBac Has good rep and makes big claims: http://www.ultrabac.com/products/
This was helpful to me: http://blog.hishamrana.com/2006/02/22/how-to-image-windows-xp-with-ghost-and-sysprep/

If that is verified I think it would be a GREAT thing. (opening wallet..)
Being able to REALLY port my set-up to another box would save me many hours of frustation as opposed to reinstall and spend days clicking and fluffinf with slipstreaming and rejigging and updating etc...

 

Successful universal restore is *quite* a bit more complex than simply ensuring that the proper hal.dll file is present. I'd love to go into all of the details, but I'm not at liberty to do so.

@starfish / @gary - have responded via PM/email respectively.

 

@grnxnm
Home users and small business are I'm sure a pain when big accounts with big rollouts loom
eg I would only need 2or 3 boxes to be "revamped" occasionally, fighteningly enough I am mostly my own "tech guy"

Will your new implementation cater to the little guys easily?

regards.

Edit: it's how Mr gates became socially secure

 

UBDR Gold does sound great I sent a mail to a new reseller to get a demo and pricing info. the gold version does no appear to have a demo version from the web and the recovery pe iso is £9 to demo
http://www.orbitsw.co.uk/ultra_down.htm

"Another first is Gold's ability to perform physical-to-virtual (P2V) disaster recoveries. This allows organizations to recover a server and virtually emulate it 100% in as little as 15 minutes. To perform a P2V recovery, simply create as many new virtual environments as required on your host virtual server. Then use UBDR Gold to boot into the recovery wizard. Recovering to a virtual environment is automatic, and requires no special setup, pre-configuration, or other considerations. The problems experienced when restoring to dissimilar hardware are eliminated."

 

Yup, it's super easy to use.

 

Question about Acronis Universal Restore

I read some where that some one had an image (Windows XP Professional SP2) from Acronis True Image Workstation 9.1.3718 stored on an external usb 2.0 hard drive and tried putting the image on a computer with different hardware, but the usb adpater on the older computer was usb 1.1. Also, they said there build was Acronis True Image Workstation 9.1.3718 but the build they were using for Acronis Universal Restore Workstation plug in was 9.1.3534. When they tried restoring the image off the external usb 2.0 external hard drive on to the older computer (usb 1.1) with different hardware, they said it was going to take around a day to restore.

What was more likely the cause for the slow restore, the fact that the old computer had a usb 1.1 adapter and not a usb 2.0 adapter or the fact that the Acronis True Image Workstation 9.1.3718 and the Acronis Universal Restore Workstation 9.1.3534 didn't match in the build version?

As you can tell from my post my biggest decision in purchasing imaging software is one that will allow me to restore an image to computers with different hardware (I have way too many windows xp professional SP2 images) and that it doesn't take a day to restore as I'm hearing reports that Acronis Universal Restore plug in is taking that long to restore an image to computers with different hardware.

Thanks for your help!

 

I have TI corporate - I have not checked the build numbers but they are not going to be the same ... since I bought TI the main prog has been updated many times - universal restore does not appear to have been updated.

USB 1.1 vs 2 is likely to be a factor - on my laptop - a complete image does not take a day for a 40 gb disk 5-6 hours to a usb 1.1 drive or much quicker if I put a card bus or PCMCIA usb adaptor in.


So usb 1.1 is part of the problem may be all ......

 

Finally coughed up the $$$ and bought myself a copy of ShadowProtect Desktop. Thanks to grnxnm for answering my stream of questions!

 

I use ShasowProtect also and am enjoying it very much. Will be glad to hear your experinece.

Gary

 

I'm curious to get your take on True Image's Universal Restore feature. Have you used it?

 

I've have only played with it - as I have similar hardware with same SATA controllers etc ..... but its seems very good. That said I have had a lot of problems with TI corp version on my hardware - I'm currently running an internal? version 9.1 b 3743. As the pulbic versions did not appear to lock the partitions leading to no image. Given it lack of relialbe performance just imaging

I mostly switched to Paragon Drive Backup 8 - this appears very reliable but does not have the uni Res capability.

At the moment I'd probabably use the approach detailed in post 450 to restore to different hw. But I'd prefer a stand alone app that works directly with windows - because I use First Defence and simliar and have many snapshots.

 

It's fast and accurate - backing up 10gb worth of data takes under 3 minutes (not including verification). The recovery environment works fine in both standard and additional driver modes - I can specify the driver or use the additional ones on the disk which supports my chipset.

Hopefully we'll see the verification become integrated into the backup process / wizard. All in all, very happy

 

Agree with your wish for integrated verification and I am very happy also with this fine product.

Gary

 

@grnxnm - is there any plans to add special characters / keywords into the name of backups?

E.g. Naming the backup %yyyy_mm_dd%_c_vol.spf will create a backup using the current year, month and date. And something similar for including the time.

It would make it easy to rerun an existing backup job without having to modify anything.

 

Ok, I got abit lost in here
So Shadow protect another utility for restore users so far report good results.

Unless I missed something:
No verification/validation until "image" restored?

I am trying to conceptualise possible uses involving combination of my imaging utility BING/IFW and my instant recovery FDISR: will Shadow Protect cover the fuctionality of both?

Couple of other Qs if I may:
+ "Universal restore" not yet implemented? but planned

+ Is S-P compatible with any partition manager?

+ Can I restore an "image" to any partition Ie newly created partition and have 2 or more bootable options?

+ If I create a special cutdown partition for surfing and/or gaming will that partition be secure and wiil a "restore" to that partition overwrite any changes?

+ Is there a "freeze" or "lock " option to maintain or return to original state of any image on any partition with or without reboot?

+ How does S-P deal with restore to different size partition:
1) if original data and free space is less than partition being restored to?
2) if data is less than partition being restored to but free space if included is greater? ie (sorry for non tech struggle with terminology) data physically spread over more space in disc than simple size indicates.

+ If I have totally fritzed my primary HD how do I restore an image on/from external HD in:
1) in total software burn out needing reformat
2) hardware failure of primary

Thx

If all these are answered in a help file somewhere please point me to it.

Regards

 

OK
You know I love my Terabyte. One of the best finds ever imho.

Have minor issues with imaging because of my biggish "C' as primary partition and need To re-image whole partition for v.small changes.
Takes a bit of time.
FdISR gets around that with Archives and snapshot exports etc.

WOuld love to be able to do reliable differentials or combinations?synching
(I think that is what you are describing?)

Take a lot to make me change! Maybe a bit slow, but STRONG.

Will Shadowprotect and shadow user work with FDISR.?

Regards.

 

That's an interesting idea. I'll bring it up with the development team. Incidentally, you shouldn't have to change the name at all - each time you run your backup job it will use the pattern you gave it (the default is something like "C_VOL") and will append onto that a unique value such as _b001.spf The name you provide is a pattern which is used as a guideline in naming the image file(s). It's not the actual filename. The job will ensure that it always uses a new/unique filename when creating a new image file.

 

In addition to automatically (and transparently) verifying image file data integrity (using CRC32) during restore, an independent image file verification tool is available right now (thanks in large part to the demand from this forum's users), but it's a command line tool. If you're afraid of running tools from the command line you'll need to wait for version 3 which will have a GUI for this feature.

ShadowProtect "Universal Restore" feature (it'll have a different name when it's released) is 100% implemented, but will not be released (AFAIK) until version 3.

Yes

Yes, as long as the partition you restore to is of sufficient size, you can restore to any partition and have multiple boot options.

What do you mean by a "secure" partition? If you restore an image to any partition, the previous contents of that partition will be replaced by the data that you are restoring.

There is no need to freeze or lock your volume when you back it up because ShadowProtect uses StorageCraft's snapshot device driver to instantaneously capture the state of the volume's data to be used when capturing the volume image. Snapshot technology allows you to capture this state without interrupting application execution. Refer to posting 295 in this thread for more detail. Incidentally, StorageCraft's snapshot technology is used by many companies, and in several backup products. It's been around for several years, is deployed on tens of millions of computers, and has matured to very robust state.

Maybe that wasn't what you were asking. I'm coming from a "backup/restore" perspective, and I have a feeling you're talking more about volume management in general. ShadowProtect isn't intended to be a volume manager, so it doesn't include any features to freeze/lock a volume from usage.

Great question, and frankly it's one of the current weaknesses of ShadowProtect. If you try to restore an image to a volume which is not >= the size of the volume from which the image originated, you will not be able to restore the image. The target of the restore must be >= the size of the source volume of the backup. Naturally this is on our radar.

ShadowProtect includes a bootable recovery CD which is based on Window PE and includes the tools necessary to restore your system in both of the cases you mentioned. Also, if you wish you can create backups from within this cd-boot environment (for those who love "cold" images).

 

@grnxnhm

Not afraid but point and click easier for old fogey' like me

Heh: something poetic yet powerful?

Yes good you're a mind reader

OK what if a mistaken attempt to restore to smaller partition is made - it happens - what is end result? Loss of image? Disc space screwed for good with partial restore? Will there be built in fail safes for odd user booboo?
When for V3? Will there be a trial for V3?

 

How about Silicon Image 3112 Raid Drivers? Will ShadowProtect work with those?

 

A free offer from paragon. Timelimited to 1st november: http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/downloads/2165194/exact-image
http://www.exact-image.com/features.htm
Of course they want you to upgrade but it is a nice offer nevertheless.

I dont know the difference with this and the Drive backup version mentioned in this thread earlier.

I did install and made a image of C: drive without problems. I´ll do a restore later (need to buy CD´s)

 

Straight from the website :

I wonder what that word "demo" means, a crippled version ? I don't like crippled versions of any backup software.
Even Acronis fooled me with a crippled version of the Rescue CD, while the rest was working completely.
It's already too late for me to change ATI into anything else.
It's working and I don't want to do my previous tests all over again.
Nevertheless Paragon Exact Image is on my list as possible alternative, together with ShadowProtect.
I hope that both recover FDISR as well. Thanks for the info !!!