Drive Snapshot Surprisingly Excellent:

I heard EASTER and others talking about how great Drive Snapshot was after my tried and true backup softwares failed me in Windows 7 DS succeeded. It is light and powerful. I had heard that there was an added gui but that project is now deceased. Too bad.. If you guys could hip me on the finer points of using DS via commands I'd appreciate it.

 

Read this post.

 

apathy,

I guess you know that DS includes the page file and hibernation file in a Win7 backup image. This could lead to an unnecessarily large image file. It may not bother you but it bothers others.

 

Drive snapshot is the greatest of all!!

 

Guys, is it a lifetime license? or do I need to pay for version upgrade?

 

is it or will it ever be win7 ready?

 

I like Drive Snapshot. But why dont they offer a ready downloadable boot cd. Everything looks good until you get to how-to restore page.

 

I don't know why but you can easily create your own boot CD.

"Create Disaster Recovery Diskette" to a floppy or Virtual floppy. Create a boot CD from the floppy.

Are you OK with restoring from a Snapshot DOS CD? Restoring from a BartPE or VistaPE CD is much easier.

 

Please read this. It should help.

 

Hi thank you both. I wasn't really seeking help. I was only pointing out what imo isn't very user friendly. Everything on their website looks like they have forgotten the also important part which is restoring. Look how easy it is to make a Backup, select partitions click backup and there you go.
Restoring is totally different. You are, not totally left alone, but its in your hands to find out how to make an boot cd. Well nobody is forcing me to use DS of course.

 

it also works great for SSD owners who still use Windows XP. It preserves the drive alignment when other imaging programs don't.

 

That is a good point. But, let me just give you a couple things to think about before you make an imaging application decision. With Drive Snapshot there are no services that can interfere with your system, as has been reported with other software. It is just one exe file.

But if you're looking for something that is easier to restore, where you don't have to create your own media, might I suggest ShadowProtect. There are a lot of reasons why I like this, which I'd be happy to discuss with you, namely the restoration is effortless. I also use UltraISO, which allows me to edit the SP recovery .iso to include my data images so that everything I need can be on one disc. With can also be the case with Drive Snapshot when use Ultimate Boot Disc for Windows.

 

Hi thanks for your suggestion. I already use Image for Windows. Also no background services. The boot cd is easily created and loads in seconds (Image f. DOS). Although not officially supported it works perfect on Win7. I'm more than happy

 

I love Image for Windows/Dos and have used it for quite a while now.
Be careful because the tbiview plugin for I4W doesn't work right in Win7
and will not restore properly at times. We need 100% compatibility for Win7 in ShadowProtect and I4W.

I am going to do a mini review of Acronis True Image Home 2010 here in a sec.

 

I dont use tbview to restore. I restore with Image for Dos and backup with Image for Windows. Never had probs with Win7. Are you using the tbview plugin in a bart cd? That is something i never tried.

Acronis is nice too, but too much background services for my taste.
Although really like the very fast incremental backups of Acronis and the exclusion of folders.

 

Re: Drive Snapshot Surprisingly Excellent: (a happy user)

I have used drive snapshot for several weeks now under XP. In addition to tests I performed with the sofware when I first tried it, I have only used DS twice for recovery in real situations, once for the boot partition.
I use a Bart PE boot CD for primary partition recovery. It is really easy to make such a CD. BartPE supports Drive Snapshot.

Backing up (full or differential imaging) is quick and easy with the provided Windows GUI.

Image exploration and recovery worked perfectly both when testing and when I needed it for real.

I moved to DS from Acronis True Image after repeated bad experiences with Acronis TI 2009. I was at the time looking for an imaging system that did not suffer from a bloat of -mostly non-working- features and functioned reliably. I was attracted to Drive Snapshot by the many positive reports on public forums, including here.

Simplicity and reliability are said to be its strengths. So far for me DS has fulfilled my hopes.

The other side of the coin is that you have to do a few things to tailor DS to work the way you want it to. Making a recovery boot CD if you want to use the convenience of the Windows GUI for recovery is one of these jobs, but the simplest of what you may want to do.

The other thing that I wanted was the ability to image sets of partitions as different backup jobs, some jobs scheduled daily, some weekly or started manually. A job should be automatically performed as a full backup the first time or when specified at a later time, and as differential backups at all other times.

Drive Snapshot offers a comprehensive command-line interface, however you need to write scripts or Windows batch files to implement such automated backup jobs. That aspect may become a more substantial undertaking depending on how far you want to go in automating your backups.

I was able to achieve my aim of automating Drive Snapshot by using a Windows batch file and the scheduler, but that turned out to be a major job indeed as I had little experience with Windows batch programming.

To implement those job sets I wrote a batch program that can be re-used to easily automate backup sets as I described above. I have 3 different backup jobs currently going on based on that batch program, one started daily by the scheduler, the others manually, on demand.

The system has been in place now for four weeks and works flawlessly for me. The scheduler starts my backup job, or I start one manually. Separate log files record the result of each job and I receive an email notice of the success or failure of each job. I am told of the disk space used by each backup job and of the remaining space on the backup device.

I had so much work setting up this automated backup system with DS that I thought it could be a good idea to let others with similar requirements save time by seeing how I had done it. They could grab parts of that code for their own automation job, or use it "as is" if they were game.

I have now released the Drive Snapshot automation batch program as a GoogleCode project at http://code.google.com/p/drive-snapshot-automation/ . I refer to it as DSA (Drive Snapshot Automation). Documentation in the wiki on that site is now well advanced, so you can hopefully easily understand how to use it.

CAVEAT:
However remember, this is "alpha" stuff, working for one guy on one XP machine. Feel free to use it or copy parts of the code. I have tried to write code as portable as possible across Windows systems, but that is not tested. Don't expect it to work off the shelf for you without some modifications, especially if you use Vista or Windows7.

Contributions:
If you try it and find issues with the batch program, please publish these on the GoogleCode project site. I'll investigate -but don't expect a quick answer-. If you have fixes or improvements that you want to contribute, just give me the details and ask me (via email) as the project owner on the project site to give you the necessary permissions.