Best Imaging Software?

Gary,

Note sure it will make any difference in your case, but SC just released a new version of SPD (3.5). Might be worth a shot......

http://www.storagecraft.com/software_update.php

 

any changelog?

 

Shadow Protect v3.5

Features/Enhancements:

* The ShadowProtect tray icon now emits balloon notification messages whenever a task (backup, restore, etc) has completed. The notification ballon messages are only displayed if the main ShadowProtect window is minimized or if it's not in the foreground or if the selected view isn't Backup Jobs or Backup History. The notification ballon messages include the task status and source and destination. Clicking on the notification balloon message makes the main ShadowProtect window active and switches the view to Backup History and opens the corresponding task's detailed log.

* The email notification feature now supports additional authentication methods (Plain, AUTH Login, Cram MD5 and NTLM), as well as SSL with any of these methods (which means you can configure notifications with services such as Google Mail - for Gmail use server smtp.gmail.com, port 465, use SSL, use either Plain or Login authentication, and enter your gmail email SMTP account name (minus the @gmail.com), address (with the @gmail.com), and password). Users can also specify if they want to append custom text to the email subject (such as a company name in cases where you manage services for clients from many companies) and pre-pended to the body of the email. The Agent Options dialog now has a "Test Email" button.

* A new Agent Option has been added which enables users to specify, in seconds, am amount of time they want the ShadowProtect Agent (which is the ShadowProtectSvc.exe NT service) to wait before beginning a backup after the service has started. The intent of this feature is to make it possible for users to prevent backups from beginning immediately after their machine has booted.

* A new Agent Option has been added which enables users to specify the names of VSS writers which should be excluded from VSS-based backups. The effect of this is that the specified writers will not be quiesced by VSS. Their data will still be backed up, but it will be captured in an in-use state rather than a quiesced state. One use for this would be to exclude a non-essential writer from the VSS process, particularly spit writers, thereby reducing the size of the image file. Essential VSS Writers (such as SQL, Exchange, IIS, NTDS) should, generally, not be excluded.

* A new option to ignore read failures (and continue the backup) now exists in the backup job wizard. Users whose drives are failing (where the hardware fails to return read requests) can now back up their data. Backup image files will contain zeroes for those sectors which could not be read. This option is off, by default, which means that if a backup fails to read, the backup itself will fail. The intent is that you configure email notification and are notified when your hardware begins to fail. You then intercede and change this setting (edit your job - check the "ignore read failures" box) and take a backup. The backup will then succeed. And, this would be a good time to buy a new hard drive. If you want to override this and always enable backups despite read failures, then simply create a system environment variable named SP_SBVOL_IGNORE_READ_ERRORS with any value (such as 1) and restart the ShadowProtect Service.

* On successful backup, if the user has specified a post-backup command containing the text $SPFILES then this text $SPFILES will be substitued with the text of the full paths to each of the new backup files created by the backup job, delimited with the | character. If you use this option, then it is highly recommended that you always enclose this text in quotes "$SPFILES" when you enter it in the post-backup command's edit box. This text substitution makes it possible for you to pass the list of new image files as a parameter to the command you wish to execute. Search the StorageCraft forums for posts with the tag PostBackupVerify for a sample script that you can use to verify (and email on failure) any newly-created backups.

* The Boot Configuration tool in the bootable-CD ShadowProtect Recovery Environment has been extended. This is an advanced tool and generally is only necessary for very complex multi-boot systems.

* The Hardware Independent Restore (HIR) functionality in the bootable-CD ShadowProtect Recovery Environment now has an additional Advanced Option which enables users to add specific .INF files to the list of additional directories and files to be considered by HIR when it attempts to find the best drivers for the hardware. The old option, to add directories, still exists. When a directory is added to the HIR Advanced Options list, drivers in that directory will be considered by HIR. However, if HIR finds another driver (on the target volume itself, for instance) which is a better match for the hardware, then HIR will install the best matching driver. However, when a specific file is added to the list, it will be given precedence over all other matching drivers found by HIR. This will make it easier for users, who are certain they have the correct storage miniport driver, to force HIR to install their specific storage driver. Just point to its specific INF file.

* The Hardware Independent Restore (HIR) functionality in the bootable-CD ShadowProtect Recovery Environment now has an additional Advanced Option which enables users to specify if they want the target volume's Windows Activation to be Deactivated. It has been found that occasionally after an HIR restore, the user will boot and login and immediately be logged back out, without any prompt or opportunity to reactivate their Windows installation. By checking this Deactivate box, users in such a situation will be prompted to re-activate their Windows installation.



Issues Resolved:

* Fix to an issue which would cause the ShadowProtect.exe GUI to not automatically connect to the last-connected ShadowProtectSvc.exe agent (NT service) after upgrading. Users had to click on "Network View" and then in the Network View they had to click on the Connect button. This issue would only occur once, after an upgrade install.

* Fix for a hang in the ShadowProect Service (ShadowProtectSvc.exe) which occurs when the Microsoft Volume Shadowcopy Service (VSS) is in a bad state. Rather than hanging, the service now continues to perform a snapshot-based backup, just without the involvement of VSS.

* Fix for an issue in sbrun.exe which could cause backups to network shares to fail.

* Fix to post-restore code which patches the volume boot record incorrectly for unrecognized file systems (such as would occur if you backed up an encrypted volume from the WinPE environment and then restored that backup).

* Fix to eliminate NTDS event log errors occurring after 64 snapshots fill up the NTDS VSS writer's status log. These errors didn't actually cause any problem but they did confuse some users and so we took the steps necessary to eliminate such log entries.

* Fix to stcvsm.sys for blue screens (BSODs) occurring on Win7 RTM.

* Fix to the post-restore BCD patching code.

* Fix to the installer dealing with registration of the VSnapVSS.exe NT service on upgrade. On some upgrades, users had problems because this service was not registered.

* Fixed an issue which caused KeyFile.exe and KeyFileMaker.exe to crash when run on Windows Server 2008.

* Fixed an issue which occasionally caused ShadowProtect to attempt to use the VSS framework when creating a backup on a Windows 2000 platform. VSS does not exist on Windows 2000.

* Fixed an issue which sometimes caused the ShadowProtect Service (ShadowProtectSvc.exe) to crash on startup if a mirrored dynamic disk volume was present.

* Fixed an issue in which most of the time the execution completion status of the post-backup job was not logged in the task detail log.

* When editing a job, if the user checked the "Backup Now" box at the end of the wizard, the backup job would make a new full backup even if it was a job which supported incrementals. This has been fixed such that an incremental will be attempted if at all possible, and if not, then a base will be created.

* Optimized image chain resolution code which could cause image.exe or SBMntWiz.exe to run out of memory in cases where a user attempts to resolve the chain of dependent image files for a specified image file (this happens automatically during a mount operation, for instance) of an image in a large image set in which collapses have been performed yet no files deleted after collapse.