EAZ-FIX and Rollback Rx vulnerabilities

Pete, I know you are happy with ShadowProtect and I'm not suggesting you change to anything else. As far as Recovery CDs not seeing your HDDs, I can relate to that on one of our PCs with both BartPE and VistaPE. But I have found that the ATI 11 CD and UBCD4Win (for using DS) see all my drives on each of our 3 PCs!

 

I guess ATI 11 is much more advanced then ATI 9 i once trying long time ago,one thing i remember was the mouse issue,had to do a painfull excercise on the keyboard,any suggestions done by members or staff did't work so dropped ATI eventually.My current imaging software is Shadow Protect with their WinPe recovery environment and sofar never had any issues.

 

Do you see any complain or anger in my post. I'm just telling that HDS doesn't sell FDISR Workstation anymore and replaced it with FDISR Rescue. That's all, the rest is your imagination. I'm not a fan of FDISR either, because I have a list of complaints about FDISR, which doesn't matter anymore of course.
I'm just waiting for an equal or better software that replaces FDISR, which doesn't exist yet. I have at least 5 years to wait.

 

Quote from the HDS Forums:

"This is for all those people that are in denial about chkdsk not trashing your hard drive (or giving you repeated heart attacks as you rollback back sequentially desperately hoping that you find a good snapshot before you run out of snapshot to rollback to).

Do you all want to know how to experience this disaster. Well here it is!

On my system (WindowsXP SP2) and the latest version of Rollback, I like taking snapshots just before I shutdown ( I mean like seconds). What i used to do (before my doctor told me my heart wont take anymore) is I would take a snapshot, then I would do some maintenance by deleting one or two snapshots, then I would run the Rollback defragger and then i would immediatle after that shutdown. (Because I've done it this way for awhile I do it quite quickly). Well occasionally my system would hang on "windows shutting down". Upon pressing reset and the system reboot, chkdsk would run and low and behold some unimaginable and horrifying errors (hundreds maybe thousands of them) would be corrected and when complete, well lets say i may as well have taken a hammer to my harddrive. Now if you stop chkdsk from running you'll find that the current snapshot is not very reliable or you'll be lucky if it boots at all. When rolling back from this point you'll most likely suffer mulitple heart attacks (dont worry you wont be the first) until you'll either drop on your knees and thank the Gods you found a snapshot that boots without errors or you run for the nearest cliff to throw yourself off of!
So to temporarily resolve my problem I take a snapshot (and thats all i do) then i leave my pc alone for at least 5 min to make sure its finishes writing and making what ever changes on the hard drive it needs to do to make it a permanent snapshot and after this i will shutdown and perform my "Indian Shutdown Dance" (no offence to Indian people), say 5 Hail Marys and 5 Our fathers and with some kind of divine intervention my PC will shutdown 95% of the time (I say 95% because lets face it....Windows sucks!)

Right. I feel much better now. What I would like is for all those "Oh chkdsk doesnt cause any problems with rollback" people...no....wait...I dare all those people to do the following to replicate and once and for all prove that there is a problem with chkdsk and rollback.

Take your snapshot (right click on the icon and select "Take snapshot" then shutdown immediately (dont wait 5 min and dont worry about deleting snapshots or running defrag. Im sure just taking a snapshot will give you errors on a failed shutdown). Now while your computer is shutting down, press the reset button (This is to simulate a hung system and pressing reset to reboot). Press the reset just after the "Saving Settings" message.
Now GOOD LUCK with that! DONT FORGET TO BACKUP YOUR DATA FILES AT THE VERY LEAST before you attempt this. Let the game begin!

Let me say lastly that I've put a support ticket in for this issue and they have told me that it will be fixed in the next release in December some time. So dont misunderstand me and think that im having a go at Horizon folks. Im not. I think that they are working their buts off on this because of everything that has been said in this and other forums about this issue. So no I dont believe they have their heads buried in the sand!

PS I apologise if I sound a little condescending but really this has gone on for too long."

 

I had some problems with lockups on shutting down and going into standby on the most recent build of 8.1 on the HDS site (2690992143).

I contacted support who advised me to try entering 'lockdisk=0' into the settings menu in the pre-boot screen. The default is 'lockdisk=2'. I haven't had a lockup since then and that was about two weeks ago.

There are some changes that have been made in v8.1 which mean that the restore at restart actually takes place before the PC shuts down rather than when it boots up again which it did previously. I would guess that this is a teething problem relating to that.

Did I miss some law that says chkdsk can't run when RB is installed? If the system has frozen and is powered off without shutting down normally then I would fully expect chkdsk to kick in.

Graham

 

How is it with using "clear empty (unused) space" programs (e.g., a feature of Norton Utilities, Eraser, etc.)? Can these be safely used with EF/RB installed? Won't they create a mess on the protected partition(s)?

 

As an RB user, I am now also using Avanquest's System Suite 8 which includes a complete set of utilities. I have performed AV-AS scans and run the file and reg cleaners on the RB-protected (system) partiton without any problems whatsoever, but I will not attempt to run their 'Jet Defrag' because running 3rd party defraggers on an EF/RB protected partition is not recommended and (reportedly) brings about problems!

 

Well i must admit ,that ive reinstalled my OS W200 pro ,and ive left rollback rx 8.1 off it.All had been going well for the last few months,though occasionally i would reboot my OS and get a windows cant load because of a file missing or corrupted in system 32 folder.It was strange because there wasnt any such file in the system32 folder.I put this down to my testing various softwares etc and just rebooted the last good snapshot.However it sometimes happened out of the blue when i wasnt testing anything,and im of the opinion that the error was either directly or indirectly caused by rollback.Any way to cut a long story short ,i had the windows error again saying it couldnt load ,so i rebooted to a "good snapshot".Every thing worked and windows loaded.I then created a snapshot after the boot,and made that the new baseline.....big mistake.When i shutdown that night and turned the pc on in the morning ,i had the windows error (missing or coruppted file in system32 folder ,and windows wouldnt boot.No problems i thought...ill just use that snapshot that i saved and which was now my baseline.Unfortuantley windows wouldnt boot again using the one and only snapshot that i had (no safe mode either) and gave the same error so im assuming that the last snapshot had the error on it or was responsible for the error in the first place.I then used 4 w2000 bootdisks to put system files etc back on.I then tried chkdsk and had to wait nearly an hour (ive only got a 19gig HD) for chkdsk to find thousand upon thousand of errors and orphan files.I presumed that this was something to do with rollbacks "hidden" snapshots as ive never seen that before..After that i thought it would be wiser to just format everything and install the OS from scratch.I dont have anything that important on my pc ,and what i do consider important ive backed up to cd and can basically get my pc back as it was within a day and a half so nothing major.Im not using any rollback programes anymore as i now think they can be more trouble than the worth of it.I will miss the arrogance that i once had in thinking that i could just rely on the snapshot to get me out of trouble.It has brought me down to earth and i think ill just be more careful in future or get that external harddrive i was thinking about for christmas instead.
ellison

 

I have to admit that the above account was a devastating and very discouraging feedback of v8.1's performance making me more and more consider uninstalling EF(RB) and returning to the good old GoBack 4, with all its imperfections. As I mentioned in my first contribution that started this discussion, I used it for some 8 years! and never lost a partition or had to reformat. This was simply an "unknown territory" for me. And I also don't think that it slowed down my system, at least it wasn't noticeable as my system is pretty fast. As I am not using Vista and don't plan to move to it soon I don't have even this motivation to stick to it (there's no GB for Vista and as it stands, won't be). You can freely defrag and clear empty space with GB the main drawback for me having been its occasional suspension due to massive file activity. But this can be often predicted and with regular ATI backup made, it created - at least for me - a bulletproof system. Starting to think of saying good-bye to EF/RB...:-( I cannot responsibly ignore chilling facts that hidden snapshots at this stage of development and knowing seem to be a potentially dangerous and insufficiently explored area with unpredictable and often utterly destructive behavior.

 

Please bear in mind that the above was just my experience.Im sure theres countless others who havent had any problems.What ive learned from it personally though,is that its not 100% foolproof (though what is?),and that i probably should have invested in an external backup drive instead.
ellison

 

Selukwe,
Good old GoBack. I hear you.
Used it for about 5 yrs. Saved my rump roast many a times.
What led me to try other things, I have EAZ-FIX and BootBack, was a corrupted registry. Don't know how that happened but my computer would not restart and GoBack would'nt go back.
My image with ATI would not work either probably because I could not shut down GoBack.
As ellison64 said, nothing is a 100%, but damn, GoBack was very close, at least with my experiences with it.
I've had no problems running BootBack and EAZ-FIX so far, about 4 months now, but if I did, GoBack and a good Image program might just be the ticket again.
Dan

 

I was a GoBack user (from its Roxio through Symantec ownership) and experienced the very same corruption which soured me on the product. Fortunately, ATI was able to restore my system to 'save my butt' at that time.

Another issue is that GoBack drains resources much much more than EZ/RB because it is continuously monitoring & recording all changes!

As I and others have suggested over and over, the instant-restore backups are very convenient but any of them can fail, so the most critical backup to have in place is disk-imaging!

 

if you are satisfy with GOBACK, stick with it.....

but don't believe with negative feedback about RBRx.....since you are testing it right now and never experience the problem, try to play it more and give it more time....i've been beating RBRx8.1 for a couple of months but it never give me problem.

anyway, if you got RBRx8.1 license and decided to drop it you can still use imaging feature of v8.1


goodluck!

 

I'm not dropping my EF 8.1 as yet, I'm just openly sharing my emotions. The more I read and learn about EF/RB, the more GoBack gets rehabilitated in my eyes (my personal long term experience; I'm not imposing my view on anybody). Will continue testing EF, though, but external backup here is really an absolute must... With GB I did it quite irregularly but it never deceived me... And as far as EF 8.1's imaging capabilities are concerned - thank you, but no thank you. My tested number one that I rely upon is ATI.

 

I would say that, if the software is working within the Windows/RB environment then they can run but they seem a bit pointless as they are not really going to know what is free space and what is space occupied by snapshot data. They could potentially make things less efficient as a result.

If they are running outside of Windows then they are likely to cause major problems as EF/RB will have no control over what they do.

Graham

 

Sorry to hear of your problems. Did you still have the RB pre-boot screen available and, if so, did you try uninstalling RB from there? It's hard to be sure but it is possible that if the MBR was restored to its original pre-RB state then you may have had a bootable system. But that's only speculation at this stage . There was probably no turning back though after using the boot disks to replace sytem files. RB keeps its own index of files and where they are located on the drive and so chkdsk will simply try to sort out what it finds.

Graham

 

I'm also an ex-GoBack user and apart from a couple of failures, which could have been user-trouble, then I was very happy with it. The main drawback for me was the that 8GB buffer limit could sometimes result in me having just a few days of GB history to fall back on. It is important to remember that one of RB's strengths, and weaknesses, is that it doesn't copy any data anywhere. This makes it fast but also, potentially, vulnerable and so imaging is essential. But then, imaging should be done with whatever system is used.

EF/RB seems to be the Marmite of the ISR world (you either love it or hate it - for non-UK readers ) I think it helps to have a basic understanding of how it works (there are some useful documents on the HDS site) so that you can avoid doing things which are likely to compromise it. Go by your own experience....but do make sure you have a backup .

Graham

 

Pete,

You missed the point of my post.

According to the post in the HDS forum, HDS has admitted the problem: "Let me say lastly that I've put a support ticket in for this issue and they have told me that it will be fixed in the next release in December some time. So dont misunderstand me and think that im having a go at Horizon folks. Im not. I think that they are working their buts off on this because of everything that has been said in this and other forums about this issue. So no I dont believe they have their heads buried in the sand!"

Silver

 

Yes i did have the preboot stage with the one snapshot on (baseline).I didnt try uninstalling to be honest.I havent actually noticed that i could uninstall from the preboot screen? ,though i have been looking at the rollback rx forums and apparently i could have.What lost my trust in it a little was that i rebooted to a presumably "good snapshot" ,made that the baseline yet when i restarted the machine the original windows system file is missing or corrupted error happened again.I may install again and see if i get the same problems.Now im "rebuilding" my machine ,im choosing the software i use a little more carefully.Ive already taken threatfire off as it is responsible for my desktop "freezing" at boot time,when other apps are loading such as my av and firewall.I also had threatfire running when i had problems with rollback rx.Although in theory there shouldnt be any problems ,ive wised up to the fact that many apps just dont go together,on each system,so im not ruling out a conflict there.I may reinstall rollback ,leave threatfire off and test for a while.
ellison

 

It's also worth remembering that, even if a particular snapshot doesn't boot you may still be able to recover files from it. So, if the current state of the system won't boot, take a snapshot of it anyway so that you can use the file recovery facility on it (this assumes you've got at least one working snapshot ).

Graham

 

This is, of course, open to (mis)interpretation. I would have said that the poster reported the freeze on shutdown for which there is a temporary workaround (see my post #81) and which will be properly fixed in the next build. I don't think that they've 'admitted' anything.

The sort of testing the poster carried out was also done and documented by their own developer on their forum back in September when he confirmed that improper shutdowns with RB installed were more likely to cause chkdsk to run than would be the case if RB were not installed. Some changes were to be made in v8.1 to try and reduce this differential. I haven't tested this with and without RB in v8.1 to see if this was effective but will try it when I get a chance unless anyone else has already(?).

I personally believe that chkdsk running (provided it is not running independently of the RB drivers) is a symptom of corruption rather than the cause of it.

I couldn't agree more. I suggested to them recently that they could help the end user out by resetting the date on the demo if a properly licensed installation was detected so that the user could at least run in demo mode while waiting for the activation to take place.

Graham

 

From my experiences with first RollbackRx and now EAZ-FIX, they are coded to do all the defrag chores themselves and using any other commercial defraggers will likely result in disappointments.

Another little quirk i found in EAZ-FIX, i regularly use RESTORATION to "delete completely" as it goes, already deleted files. Apparently it masses a temporary file or space to perform these overwrites and i found myself with no disc space left and the program couldn't even finish, so it would appear to me that EAZ-FIX also assumes control of whenever anything is written to disk even if you don't want or need to snapshot it, or else i missed something in the settings which is entirely possible too.

I proceeded to delete the active snapshot i done the RESTORATION on and updated the baseline with another snapper to reclaim that disc space again.

I was almost ready to throw it (EAZ-FIX) out into a cosmic abyss.

This is another reason likely why i always favor so highly FD-ISR. It passes complete control of everything to the user and has no problem being defragged by whatever defrag a user chooses.

Not a knock, just a different way EAZ-FIX goes about making and accummalating it's snapshots. The problem i have with this concept is that "IT" overtakes the duties of other common controls like defragging, launching chkdsk, and prevents a user from properly cleaning the physical disk of impurities in the form of deleted files which we know are not really deleted but still allocates space, retaining both a measure of the previous content as well as it's file records.