confused about shadow protect desktop.

hello,
i just downloaded and installed shadow protect desktop on windows 2000 pro sp4.
i done an full image and it said it completed successfully.
i done a incremental image of that image and said there was an error.
so i done a chkdisk on the harddrive since the pc with windows 2k pro on it is like 6 years old with a harddrive over 2.5years old. the d partistion had some bad blocks so windows will now not write to them.
so i deleted the the image that didnt work and the one that said it worked.
then i created a full image again.
i created a full image of C: and told it to put the image in D:\images
i will show you a screenshot of the image that it told me that completed fine and tell you a thing i dont understand.

at 17:54 and 26 seconds it tells me that it completed successfully but under that it tells me that the snapshots were destroyed wtf?
i dont want my snapshot to be destroyed i want to be able to restore it.
is it just bad wording?
please click on the screen shot to enlarge it and ignore the warped colours.
thanks in advance
lodore

 

thanks for explaining it peter
i will try and create a incremental image and see if it works now since windows now wont write to the bad sectors it found now.
lodore

 

I'll check on Monday, but IIRC, ShadowProtect can be told to ignore bad sectors (rather than issue an error) when it backs up a volume. It either does this automatically or at the behest of an Advanced Option to the backup job - I forget which.

 

ok i will wait for the answer to that.
@peter i have requested a full evuation but havent got a reply about that yet probaly will get a yes or no tomorrow when people are at the office.
lodore

 

Okay, when ShadowProtect backs up a volume, if it has sector-read errors on the volume it will issue a warning (visible in the task detail log) but will continue the backup. This is done for you automatically. There is no advanced option in the GUI to turn this on/off.

During restore, if ShadowProtect experiences a sector write error when writing data to the target volume, it will end the restore with an error.

 

ok thanks.
i done an incremental image since windows now wont write to the bad sectors and the incremental created sucessfully.
lodore

 

Lodore, I hope you don't mind me tacking on a different ShadowProtect question and reviving this thread...

I have the full evaluation disc, and have attempted to create a backup without installing ShadowProtect on my PC. In the ShadowProtect Recovery Environment, the backup wizard reports "no supported volumes".

I was under the impression that one does not need to install SP in order to create a backup from the ShadowProtect Recovery Environment. Does anyone have any suggestions?

 

Nope.

Edit: I figured it out - I had to load the Recovery Environment with additional drivers support. Thanks!

 

All versions of ShadowProtect (IT Edition, Desktop Edition, Server Edition) support backup from within the booted CD recovery environment. If you take this approach then you aren't installing anything but are rather taking your backups from an alternate environment (in this case Windows PE (WinPE)) and hence you didn't need to install anything in order to take the backup.

However, IT Edition is also capable of taking zero-install backups of your live Windows system. Just pop in the IT Edition CD and autorun it (or click on the "Start ShadowProtect" script in the root of the CD) and take a backup (no need to shutdown live Windows, no need to stop any apps, no need to install anything).

 

interesting that i found out paragon drive backup can do zero install backup's
using hot processing technlogy as the standard $50 price.
so instead of having to pay $$$ a year to get the IT edition of shadow protect IT edition i could buy paragon drive image 8.5 personal run it from cd backup C: using hot processing.
i wish there was shadow protect desktop with that option to only be used on say e.g. one or two pc's
lodore

 

The last time we evaluated Paragon's product it took 35 minutes to make a full image of a test volume. ShadowProtect took only 2 minutes to backup the same volume. Perhaps they have resolved some of their performance deficiencies since then, but for IT admins (the target customers for ShadowProtect IT Edition) they simply must have the fastest backup times period because they're typically backing up enormous volumes which can take hours. A volume that takes ShadowProtect hours to backup would take Paragon days. That's just not acceptable to some. For home users, yes, this may be a good option for you. It depends on how patient you are.

 

@ Grnxnm,
ok fair points.
how big was the test volume?
1. is there still a 50 percent mirgration offer on shadow protect desktop?
i want to mirgrate from acronis to get 50percent off shadow protect desktop.
2. when will version 3 be out?
i want to buy it soon so i know i have a fully restoreable image on my external drive in case i need to eiether restore the whole image or get files off it.
3. atm i have one pc but soon im gonna build a pc for myself so need a product that i can use on both pc's
can i use the recovery cd to backup both pc's? or is this against the license agreement?
I have some sergestions for version 3,
with paragon it only has one process called lancher.exe and only runs when you open the interface or start a backup.
can shadow protect desktop only load the two processes it has when i open the interface or tell it to do a backup?
i know the processes are idle but it still takes time at bootup to load those processes.

my old pc HD is about to go kaput.
so im gonna get a new IDE HD for it and then throughly test both paragon and shadow protect desktop to find out what i like better.
i got a full evauation of shadow protect desktop.
so once i get the new HD for my old pc i will burn the iso to a cd to test it out.
lodore

 

I don't recall the volume size. It was an XP Pro (SP2) volume, so it was likely at least 2GB in size, probably larger.

I don't see the competitive upgrade offer on the website anymore. You can email sales 'at' storagecraft.com and ask.

There's no official date on version 3. We're close.

I'm not familiar with all of the nitty gritty details of the license, so I'll have to check on that one for ya. I appreciate the fact that you asked. That says a lot.

As far as processes go, no, we will not be making any change to the processes that ShadowProtect uses. Please understand that any such change would require an absolutely massive architectural change (essentially a full rewrite). If you only use the recovery enviornment to do your backups/restores, then nothing is installed and therefore ShadowProtect doesn't add any permanent processes to your process list. If you install the Desktop or Server Edition versions, then processes that you'll see added to your process list are ShadowProtectSvc.exe (you'll see it in the list twice, even though there's really only one process that actually does stuff - this is a security mechanism - we actually do quite a lot to secure our users data/passwords/etc but don't really trumpet this fact) as well as vsnapvss.exe (which is the VSS provider service for our snapshot provider). When you're not backing up/restoring anything, these processes are essentially inert and are paged out (and hence consume basically no physical memory or CPU resources). You should not, on any account, disable, or change the Start value for these services. Otherwise I can guarantee that you will have problems with the product. Also, it's a very bad idea to disable or change the start value of Microsoft's VSS and Shadowcopy Provider services.

 

I am using XP home but i think XP Pro should be more or less around 3 Giga,not sure though.

It,s hard to think that Paragon will take 35 min to backup 2 Giga. I tried recent free offer of Paragon Hard Disk manager. When I imaged my C partition( 7.81 GB with 4.93 GB data approximately), it took between 6 to 7 min( if I remember correct) on default settings, while ATI version 7 will take about 6 min( more or less). Compression by ATI was more than Paragon on default settings( Image size 2.53 vesus 3.4 GB).

BTW when I tried backup by SP trial in the past, it was taking more than ATI on my system( approximately 8 to 9 min) that was really surprizing for me. I did not investigate this issue though as I am still not in the decision to buy SP, I will though investigate it first if I am going to buy SP in future.

 

It may very well be that Paragon is faster now than it was when we last evaluated it.

 

Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions Grnxnm.
i will look forward to the reply about the license details.
if i can use the recovery environment cd for two pc's i will probaly buy it after ive fully tested it.
sometime this weekend i will email sales and find out if the competitive upgrade offer is still avalable
lodore

 

The ShadowProtect Desktop Edition license permits you to use the recovery environment CD to backup from only one machine, but to restore to other machines.