Introducing AX64 Time Machine - hybrid imaging/snapshot software

kupo, we do have plans to make it compatible with standard user, but it's not a priority right now, sorry. Maybe in about 2 months we'll return to it.

 

There is no need to rush things, better to make it more stable as it still is in alpha after all.

 

Great point Mohamed Well said my friend.

Isso, I think you have an excellent project going that has great potential as this matures. Even in alpha stage, it is solid and as issues are addressed I can see a very large market for this particular technology. it is the best of both realms, but unique as to how you and your dev team have planned and constructed it. The snapshot style restore does the job, and does it very well within windows which in itself is unique considering no consoles and no altering boot records, etc.

This feature alone reduces the potential of MBR corruption to near zero if not rules it out. As this develops I think making an option to include MBR backup within the initial image would be good as that would be useful for when the time comes to utilize AXTM to recover to a new disk, etc. In my restore test, using recovery media, I purposely formatted the OS partition, then booted into recovery, and restored the partition image of approx. 6.3GB within about 5 minutes. it was flawless, other than the chkdsk error that I set after reboot, but I understand why it does that. It did not affect the restore and it worked great. No complaints from windows. Excellent job my friend, and I can see this only growing in demand as you iron out the details of what you want to add and the feature list. The speed is impressive, and it is true sector based restore, as after i restored my partition, I compared the restore structure to before I formatted, it was identical and even this is lacking in some of todays more popular imaging apps from my experience. Some imaging apps do not restore exactly what was imaged, but they are beginning to alter data post restore, and this is to me not at all proper.

Please tell your dev team great job! you guys truly, in my opinion, have a very clean and marketable product that once it is matured, has a large audience awaiting it

Keep up the great work Isso. I think all of us here very much appreciate being able to be involved in the alpha testing, and I for one look very forward to watching this project grow and mature. I have little doubt it will compete solidly with typical rollback style apps, and in my opinion, offers a more well rounded approach along with disaster recovery if ever needed, something that snapshot style apps usually do not offer if a drive fails, etc. Plus no 'hidden' partitions to deal with, no altering partition tables, etc. It all adds up to a a program that offers flexibility that is sorely needed with ISR style apps, without making major system changes.

To think some of these apps are 100MB - 200MB + in size, and basically taking over ones machine, what you are accomplishing is exciting to see

All my very best to you and your dev team. I hope the future holds much promise for you all.

Jim

 

Hi all

I am trying this application now.

I cannot create a backup media: the software repeats "error - use another media" - any ideas?
Marse

 

Thanks for your explanation!

Although I do not need snapshot program now, I will still pay attention to AXTM's development.

 

I am currently testing AX under a VMWare Windows 8 64bit OS.

After two backups (one full and one that seems like an incremental), I destroyed the OS and used the pre-built bootable environment to rescue it. The restore process from the pre-built environment feels more like a full image restore. Not nearly as fast as a snapshot recovery.

That's as far as I am in the testing, but I wonder. How does AX handles space management? I have it do the backup to an E: drive, but will it use it until it's completely full? What happens then?

The pre-built environment should give a short 10secs menu to let the user choose if they want to boot in the rescue environment or continue to Windows. Right now, if you forget the CD in the drive, you're stuck. The pre-built environment doesn't seem to give you a choice.

 

So far so good with recovering from within Windows. Backups are done hourly or you can specify to take a backup now, but unlike with RollbackRX, you can't have backups triggered by events (i.e. run setup.exe). From what I can tell, it is closer to Acronis Non-Stop Backup, but the big difference is that it works.

The process of taking a backup and restoring is slightly longer than an RBX snapshots, but since AX is actually using imaging technology, I guess that's expected. Slightly longer, but it is not that long.

The promise of not interfering with the MBR is correct. Restoring to a specific hour happens while you're running Windows and forces to reboot at the end. Unlike with RBX, there is no need for long delayed bootups because of snapshot defrags.

I have not yet tested AX along with another imaging software installed like Macrium.

 

Suggestion: Offer the ability to launch the "Backup browser" from the right-click menu on the tray icon.

And please clarify on how AX manages space on the backup drive. What if I want to keep only two weeks of snapshots?

Another question.. How can a 20MB software produce a 200MB ISO for the pre-built environment? Where is it coming from? And it looks like it is based on WinPE 4. Are you able to work around Microsoft's refusal to license it? How are you able to distribute a pre-built environment while the other imaging companies can't?

I just did another completely destructive operation on Win8 which stopped it to boot. AX recovered using the pre-built environment. Well done!

If you can fix the issue with CHKDSK, I might push the test onto a real computer.

When using the pre-built environment, I see that the time is off by 1 hour. It shows that my snapshot was taken at 8am and that it is 10 minutes old, but the current time is 9:10am.

I am updating this post again after playing some more with it. I tried to mangle Win8 while AX is doing its backup. That had the effect of making a bad snapshot. Recovering from it made Win8 unbootable. I had to recover from the next early snapshot. Does AX use the VSS service to do its backup? What happens when files are being changed while AX is doing a backup?

Despite having one bad snapshot in the mix, subsequent snapshots are working fine.

 

Doesn't this kind of approach make your software like Keriver 1click restore?Or better,how is your software different?Thanks.

 

If I am not mistaken, the AXTM recovery media is built from the Winre.wim file and that needs to be in its proper place, typically, C:\Recovery\ under the long numbered folder.

When I first tried this, i had long ago removed this Winre.wim file out of its place, and rec'd the Error message of try another media. I copied the Winre.wim file back to its location, and the boot media was created with no problems.

Using the Winre.wim file to build boot media appears to be increasing with some vendors and it does the job. No WAIK needed, just Winre.wim. Terabyte also can create IFW boot media using Winre.wim.

Hope that info helps anyone having boot media creation issues.

Jim

 

Jim,

Thank you so much for your detailed comment and for your kind words, that's really encouraging!

Marse,

Please check Jim's suggestion and make sure you have Winre.wim in place. The error message is misleading, we'll fix that.

 

Marc, thank you for taking time to test it!

Right, if you use the restore from recovery media, then it's slow, because the entire image gets restored. But if you do the restore from running OS - then it's fast, because only the changes are restored.

For space management - sorry, no handling so far, the program will just report an error if no more space to write. However we are considering to automatically delete the oldest backups if there is little space remaining. Also we can perhaps limit them by age as per your suggestion.

For PE creation - Jim already answered that above, we are using WinRE.wim from C:\Recovery as a basis, adding the network and storage drivers specific to your PC and creating the boot media. As for the license - we are not distributing the PE, hence no problems with MS.
We have a unique solution for XP media creation that no other company seems to offer. We also build it using the files from your OS, but the process is much more complex than for 7-8.
By the way - we don't support PE creation for Vista, because it has no WinRE. In the upcoming versions we'll add it too, although it'll require the user to insert the Vista installation CD.

Will look into time difference in PE.

As for mangling Win8 while backing up - yes we use VSS, so it should have worked fine. Could you please let me know what you did in more details via email (info@a64.com)? Thank you!

 

What I did was a bit drastic. I open a command prompt as Administrator, went into C:\Windows, issued the following command while a backup was ongoing: "DEL. /S /Q"

It's quite a nasty command to issue. Deleting everything including subfolders without asking. Not you normal everyday computer usage.

But hey... I wanted to stretch it.

As for space management, can a new main backup node (and subsequent generation) be created simply by emptying the backup folder?

 

ISSO,

Though the product is a alpha phase, The product worked without any issues and has tremendous scope. The speed of incremental backups and restores is amazing.

The And I liked the product so much that I took time to register and post this comment.

Ram

 

Joe,

Good question, thanks! AXTM has two features that none of the imaging apps offer:

1. It restores only the changed sectors rather than the entire image. That allows to save huge amount of time. For example you have a large drive, and you just installed a malware by mistake. Restoring the entire drive may take hours, while restoring only the changed sectors will take seconds.
2. AXTM restores right from the running OS, without booting into recovery media like all other imaging apps. This saves another couple of minutes per each restore.

As a result the restore process is much faster, takes seconds to minutes and feels more like using a snapshot app.

 

Isso,

You might want to disable the "Change Settings..." link on the main window while a backup is ongoing. Changing the settings while a backup is going on seems to freeze the software.

 

Tried this again, but in a manner more true to life. While a backup was ongoing, I decided to change a 5GB old Oracle dump (I replaced with a new dump with the data pump export). After the backup, I was able to confirm that the backup contained the old dump. So it worked as expected. My previous test may have been too much for Windows.

 

Ram, thank you! Much appreciated

Marc, "DEL. /S /Q" was a harsh test indeed ! I believe VSS wasn't able to handle it. I'll try that too. And I'll disable Settings - thanks for pointing it out!

 

Hi Isso,

cool update; I saw that you implemented the ability to display the custom info besides the time.
May I ask what else is changed from the version 1.0.750?

The recovery enviroment (cd/iso) in xp still does not work in the virtual machine.

As far as the stability goes. Seems more like a RC (release candidate) than alpha stage. I run it on a virtual machine for almost a month and on a win7 64 laptop for 15 days and have not encountered any problems (I performed more than 50 restores in the real machine).

Panagiotis

 

For the heck of it, I wanted to see how AXTM behaves in the presence of Macrium Reflect. Macrium is my main imaging software and I don't want to lose it. My concern is the timing between both softwares. I can imagine a time when Macrium has to do its scheduled backup in the middle of AXTM doing his. So I did two tests.

1 - Image the C: drive with Macrium Reflect and while imaging is going on, initiate a backup with AXTM.
There didn't seem to be any conflicts. Both softwares worked on their respective backups without arguing. When AXTM finished it's backup, I waited 1 minute and triggered a second one (Macrium was still fully imaging C. The process was a bit slow since both programs were analyzing and reading C:. As a result, the OS performance was also hit, but AXTM was done quickly and good performance came back. If your OS is on an SSD drive, I bet you won't notice much of a performance hit.

2 - Reverse the sequence. AXTM starts a backup and then trigger Macrium shortly after.
Macrium failed the backup reporting VSS_E_BAD_STATE error. There may be a slight window of opportunity where the two may conflict. AXTM was at its "Prepating to backup" stage when I triggered Macrium. If I trigger Macrium while AXTM is doing an actual backup, there doesn't seem to be any problems. The windows of opportunity are small. And if it's not Macrium erroring out, it is AXTM with "Imaging error C1000006". Not always reproducible, though. Seems to happen when both are trying to initialize VSS at the same time which the odds of that are rather small.

For curiosity, here are the size of backups for the C: drive of my virtual machine:
AXTM main backup: 5GB
Macrium medium compression: 4.6GB
Macrium max compression: 4.4GB

 

By the way, I used AXTM to revert to a snapshot before I installed Macrium. No traces of it after.

 

I Have tried with 2GB, 4GB and 16GB USB sticks

 

I just tried creating the recovery media on my 4GB USB thumbdrive and it worked. The drive is called "TM RECOVERY" now.

 

It seems the stick is not recognized if it contains files. When I formatted my 4GB stick (FAT32) it appeared in "available drives" when creating recovery media and it worked fine

 

Hi Panagiotis,

Thank you very much, you must have a lot of courage to test this on a real machine despite my warning that this is an alpha! And I'm really happy that it works fine for you.

As for the recovery environment and list of changes - let me send to you a PM, as version 750 wasn't publicly released. Sorry that I didn't do that before.

Isso