Drive Snap: Drive Snapshot Frontend

Could this ame automatic restore be accomplished via flash drive also? If so what modifications would you need for this and thanks.

Gary

 

Hello Brian. That was fast i didn't expect to get any feedback quite so soon. I thought you was commenting on the features introduced, was surprised you had used it yet. Glad to see it's working good straight out the bag. I'm glad you approve. It reboots to make it totally automatic but i change that. Thank You. I wasn't going to do the DOS restore until a few weeks later but as it was a challenge plus the recent discussion of DOS restores i put it to the top of the list. Is it fast enough in DOS restoring for you?

edit: I guess i made it too automatic .

 

@Markymoo
Or make auto rebootimg optional ,if possible , i like autoreboot ,i have to hit F11 at booting to get to a bootmenu to boot from cd ,so after drive snap reboots i boot from disk again automatically.
@Brian
Instead of altering boot sequence ln the bios find out if ther is an F key you can press to boot from cd once
http://www.google.com/search?aq=f&hl=nl&q=+bootmenu+F+key+&btnG=Zoeken&lr=

Lin

 

I congratulate anyone who can get there images on a DVD as they must be using a small partition successfully. The idea of Drive Snap is to backup your system and restore it with minimum effort.

Drive Snap backs up images to a central location on the hard drive keeping them all together. The Drive Snap DOS restore works out the location of the image on any of your hard drives no matter if the drive letters have changed or different in DOS or Windows for it to be automatically restored.

It works fine if you backup to any partition or other hard drive. It was a achievement to do what it can do now. It doesn't support restore from USB yet but other intenal hard drives certainly.

 

Thanks. It doesn't matter if the drive letter is different in DOS compared to Windows. Drive Snap DOS Restore CD will still find the image and restore it. I haven't tested this new feature on other systems other than my own using NTFS filing systems. It restores my RAID automatically. It works by restoring the image to the first drive which is your boot drive. Yes it goes onto the 1st primary of disk 0. There's a chance it will still find it. I believe it will refuse to restore the image if it doesn't find the exact same size partition as the one in the image on the options i set. I would backup first images onto both drives and make another primary partition the same size as the image one on the other drive. It's still in it's infancy and still early days so i not quite sure what will happen in your case. I haven't done enough testing but initial signs are promising. I don't know your configuration there. Are you using NTFS drives?

Let me do some more testing before you try that. I was going to introduce more options for that configuration.

Yes i will sort it out. It usually F8 key to popup the Boot Menu.

 

Sorry, but I'm very confused by the above and would appreciate it if someone would further explain what's going on here and the how-to's of all of this!

 

thinking again about it more logically. it is probably failing to restore right to what you described. if you expand on your system configuration i be able to help more. this is actually a good feature if the system drive is not in the right sequence then doesnt find the right partition size it fails to restore so no damaged data. is it a big deal putting the cables to the right port.

 

Hey markymoo,
thanks for you reply
i will look at the correct page in this thread and find out which option i need to use.
btw there is a bug with the enable gui button in options.
the gui lanches and the backup finishes sucessfullly but after you press the ok button on the drive snapshot gui to close, the front end seems to be frozen. had to end in task manager. im guessing you ment to do it so that the front end works again once the image is finished.

ok i created an image of C: as above hence how i found about about the error. i stored it on my Z: partition. i then used Create System Restore Menu CD
i burned it to a cd using the utility uncluded.
i rebooted and used option 1 from the menu restore to the first hard drive partition of the same size. started off fine but at around 76percent it had text which read something like cannot correct file header about 6 times then said finished and reboot in 10 seconds and had a countdown.
when it rebooted i got a classic cannot boot from floopy a:
and around 4 options. so i took out the cd rebooted and got the windows error start,i choose start windows normally. i got a windows message saying c:MFT is corropt we reccomend you run the chkdisc utility.

at this point i got out my paragon recovery cd and restored the image i created yesterday night.
i dont know what caused the errors.

 

Right, i'll wait a whjle so you have time to sort some things , i just got a new sata disk ,i could use this to make a 1st primary part. , set is as disk 1 and see what happens with dos restore ; i still have to backup some data from the bootdisk ,just to be sure .
As you said , it might be safer to swap cables so the bootdisk is disk 0.
This is my config atm. Disk 2 varies depending which disk i slide in my ide rack
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2216/2495237356_4c8dabef20_o.jpg
Lin

 

Yes it detects its finished and returns to Drive Snap. I will fix this. It's on my To Do list.

Are you using XP or Vista? Ok what i suspect may of happened is you made a bad image because your partition isn't 100%. Did you use verify?, If your filing system is faulty in a certain place . Run ChkDsk over the drive and turn on verify in Drive Snap and try again.

 

Hello Aaron, Essentially it's to restore a backup image you took of drive C with Drive Snapshot using the Drive Snap interface and restore it back again in DOS automatically pain free. You don't need to use BartPE,WinPE or other recovery cd. Have you successfully backed up your C yet using the Drive Snap interface

 

Sorry to be a little bit off topic
My question is: how to create Drive Snap DOS Restore CD?
I made a system snpashot of drive C: and want to reatore it.
Please help

 

It's currently been designed to restore from CD. A ISO is created. Your existing Drive Snapshot is copied from the current folder into the ISO. To work from USB you would have to include some boot manager that can load ISO or until i make it work for USB.

 

Hello,
im using vista.
i didnt verify the image.
since ive got backup i can always experment.
ok i tryed a verfiy on the image ive just created. it verifyed sucessfully.
i dont know why the issue occurs but at around 30percent verify my ram usage goes throught the roof and its almost impossible to use the computer
the slow down doesnt stop until around 30 seconds after its 100percent finished.
cpu usage can be quite high as well.
my pc is quad core with 2GB of ram.
if i create the image with snapshot without the frontend the major slowdown doesnt happern during verify.
hopefully you can fix that.

 

Thanks for the picture that explains alot. After all what i said before it should just work for you, something else is in the equation stopping it. You have the same configuration as I. HD1 is C. as the 2nd drive but my C is made up of 1 RAID 0 partition but it shouldn't make a difference as it has a boot priority as 1 drive in the BIOS. Another non boot drive is HD 0 as the first is displayed in Windows. Here is my configuration.

http://artco.adsl24.co.uk/markymoo/drives.jpg

 

Hello alloucho. You need a blank CD, DVD, CD-RW ready. In the Restore window of Drive Snap is your image of C. If you right click it and select
'Create Automatic System Restore CD' and click Start a CD will be burnt.

Whenever your want to restore your system you just have to insert and boot off the disk and the image is restored back in DOS recovering your system C partition.

You will need to take out the CD just after it reboots or it will automatically restore it back again. It too automatic at the moment if you walk away from your PC.

It works good yet i will have to perfect it for different configurations.

On certain PC's you can setup so you boot your hard drive first and press F8 and select CD to boot first without needing to go into the BIOS. This will stop it loading the CD again after it restored.

 

Ok i have not tested it with Vista yet. Drive Snap uses 4.5K of memory and i seen it never go above 9K. It isn't CPU intensive. It's a very light footprint. While it is running its just graphics, The resources in Task Manager display it always as 00. Once you click 'Backup' in Drive Snap the command line is passed to Drive Snapshot just like you would if you typed out the options on the command line for Drive Snapshot. It's all in Drive Snapshot hands. Drive Snap detects when it finished and pops up again. I really can't see how Drive Snap could ever do what you describe even in Vista. Are you running anything else when you backup? Drive Snap can be very disk intensive as it so fast backing up it writes alot data to the drive. Of course Vista is not the same. I will do some testing in Vista. Thanks.

 

Indeed ,your setup is similar , so the cd must work ,as i said , i must backup some data from my bootdisk first ,then i'll do some testing.
Lin

 

I can now confirm that the Automatic DOS restore CD will restore to the first hard drive and partition set by the order of the boot priority in the BIOS. If you change this priority so that another drive is the first drive then the Automatic Restore CD will restore to this newly changed drive and not to the system drive you took the image from. It will restore if the changed first drive is even an external USB. If you never mess with the boot priority and keep the Windows drive as the boot drive then it never a problem, your fine. In normal circumstances your Windows drive fails you put the CD in and it restores. I just mention as a warning in case you mess with the boot priority around the time you use the Restore CD.

 

Hello,
i was browsing the web with opera,listening to music with itunes,windows live messenger,runescape (online game)
never have those kind of slow downs when paragon is creating an image.
and its strange how drive snapshot doesnt have the major slow down issue when using it alone but does when using the front end.
so i dono really.

 

markymoo, I have been backing up my C-partition to an external USB2 hard drive using DS v1.38. Since I'm an EF user (although I may not be one for much longer), I've been booting into WinPE and using DS' maintenance mode to backup all sectors when making full and differential backups. I also boot into WinPE to restore my DS system image (from my USB drive).

When you first released Drive Snap I presumed I could use it to simplify the way I've been using DS, but your comments about creating DOS restore CDs (which I quoted in my previous post) have left me confused.

Sorry to be so dense, but I'm just not grasping this!

 

@lodore i am literally amazed you reporting this problem with it. I welcome any other reports from users backing up Vista with Drive Snapshot using Drive Snap.

 

markymoo,

Yes. Quite fast enough. The restore speed is slightly slower in DOS than BartPE but when you add the 4 minute boot time of a BartPE CD to the actual restore time, a DOS restore procedure is quicker.

In my test computer with IDE HDs, DS reported a restore time of 279 seconds. I added UDMA.sys to your CD and the restore time was 140 seconds. I've reported this before. A DOS restore is twice as fast in my test computer if UDMA drivers are loaded. Perhaps you could consider adding the drivers to your setup.

One comment on EMM386.exe. I haven't used your CD in my main computer, only my test computer. When I was testing IFD restores, EMM386.exe made no difference in my test computer but when it was loaded in my main computer, the restore took 5 times longer. Just an observation.

 

jap , bartpe is great idea but slowwww like helll.........
i think dos boot can be convert to iso using ultra iso and than burn....also there are free site provide "dos boot" iso files... u can edit them as u want , reiso them , burn on cd and here we go

 

lol GOOD u tell ppl coz if restore went wrong .. hehe all gone
10x alot mate for the great deal of time and results u pop up each day

cheers