Introducing AX64 Time Machine - hybrid imaging/snapshot software

Dear Isso,

On one of my machine I have StorageCraft Shadow Protect v4 and Acronis True Image Home and they both co-exist without any problems.

Best regards,

 

Dear Feandur,

If I am not mistaken the above thread in the forum is almost 5 years old. Now both Shadow Protect and Acronis True Image Home co-exist without any problems.

Best regards,

 

Oh ok thanks Mohamed, it means this should be easier task than I was thinking.

 

I had posted the links more in the context of what registry keys may be affected by Acronis, and so where Isso might need to look.

But, thanks for the update aladdin. Good to hear !

- cheers,
feandur

 

Dear Feandur,

Excellent! I believe the answer lies in my post #71, with the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E967-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

I have played a lot with the above registry key, moving the drivers up and down in the above key and getting different results for different programs. But I am not a programmer myself.

Best regards,

 

Dear Isso,

I love your positiveness and your desire to make your program one of the best out there. See my above post.

Best regards,

 

Great job so far Isso! Unfortunately the creation of the start-up media didn't work for me so I haven't tried it yet. For every USB stick I've tried it with it gave me the "ERROR! Please try other media" message. I've tried it with ten USB2 and USB3 sticks of sizes between 4 and 32GB and it wouldn't do it. It's even stranger that the same error happens when trying to create a start-up iso. I haven't tried the CD option, got no optical drive connected ATM. The program has installed OK and I have restarted the system. I also have Rollback RX and Shadow Defender (on demand) installed. Maybe the above problem is due to a conflict caused by those? Your help would be greatly appreciated.

Since I can't try the start-up media yet, I'd like to ask you: Can the start-up media create and restore raw/sector-by-sector images including the zero-track/MBR? Can a user restore only the zero-track/MBR from a baseline image?

I'd love to see certain features added to the program and also to the start-up media in the future, things like:

The ability to initialize new disks, with MBR and GPT options.

A zero-track/MBR backup and restore facility for all disks connected to the system. This will be very useful for people who have multiple operating systems running from different disks.

A simple file manager. This will allow users to salvage files/folders and move their data to another disk before restoring a backup, great for cases where Windows is damaged beyond repair and won't start.

Sector-by-sector back creation/restoration, image compression level setting, splitting the image to pre-defined or custom-sized chunks, incremental/differential backup choice, the ability to verify existing images on demand, and the ability to edit the notes of each backup. Maybe some of these options already exist on the start-up media, I hope I'll be able to try it soon.

Maybe even add a partition manager later on, both for use within Windows and from the start-up media. Think Acronis and Paragon but with minimal bloat, integrate similar options alongside the existing fast snapshot-like features, and you'll have a market-leading program in your hands.

I think that adding such options to AX64 would make it a complete disk management suite. If you manage to streamline such features into a bloat-free package and also keep the cost of the program down - so more people can be tempted to buy the full version - then this would attract both IRS/snapshot fans and traditional backup fans.

 

I tried it but did not find it to be extra ordinary speedy. Backup creation and restore seems to take almost same time as any other imaging software will take. Am I missing something?

 

Thank you Mohamed, I'll check it out. The registry key you mentioned is the Disk Drive class key. It doesn't directly apply to our driver, because we are monitoring separate volumes, not entire drives. However I'll be talking with our low level developer to see what effect this could have. I'll keep you posted.

 

CyberMan,

The boot media creation error is misleading, in fact it has nothing to do with the media, sorry about it. Jim had the same problem, and it turned out that he deleted Winre.WIM file from C:\Recovery, and after placing it back it worked.
But I also got another report with the same error, and after checking turned out that Winre.WIM was there. So I'll add some error logging to this part of the program to see what's hapening. I'll send a message to you then. I think this has nothing to do with RollbackRX or other programs.

For your questions:

Boot media cannot create images, it's only used for restore. In fact it's only used when your OS corrupted and not bootable, otherwise you would use a normal restore from main OS, which is much faster.

We don't restore MBR right now, but it will be added in beta.

Thank you for your suggestions. I agree if they are implemented we'll have a complete disk management suite. But I'm afraid we might lose the simplicity of the program then. Maybe we could have two operation modes - simple and advanced...

 

aigle,

The first backup takes the same time as other imaging programs. However the subsequent backups and restores should be much faster. Could you try to take two backups in a row and let me know how much time each of them takes? Also some information about your test machine would be nice to have. Thank you

 

Hello,

You may want to give this a try as it might work:
Open an Admin command prompt in Windows and type:

reagentc /enable

Press Enter and you should see "Operation successful".
(it may require a reboot so I would reboot to be safe)
Then try to create your media again ...

 

It has to do with RollBackRX (when it is installed) because RBRX changes the extension from wim to dat during the installation. On RBRX system you should check for winRE.dat instead of winRE.wim.

Panagiotis

 

Thanks. Wil try. I used Win 7 VM( VBox) in Ubuntu host on a Toshiba Satellite M 70, 1.7 Centrino, 1.5 GB Ram.

 

Dear Pandlouk,

Where were you when I was pulling my hair out.

It was the same time I believe that you were gone when your father was ill. It is when Image For Windows introduced WinRE, and I couldn't get it work on any of my machines as they all previously had Rollback Rx.

Later on, when you came back from your absence, I was then trying to reinstall Windows 7 x64 again on my systems. Very time consuming and almost impossibe. Remember, my friend you helped me on this.

Many thanks dearest Panlouk!

What would Wilders do without you.

Best regards,

Mohamed

 

ISSO,

THANKS! This sounds exciting and I look forward to a backup package that is more stable than RB and won't freeze my PC like RB has been doing.

 

Thanks for the advice Panayoti, you are right, the file is named winRE.dat. I will temporarily change the extention back to .wim and try it again.

 

Hi Mohamed and thanks for your kind words; glad I could help at the time.

regards,
Panagiotis

 

You 're welcome Cyberman. But I would avoid using them together; you'll have big troubles with the RBRX snapshots if AX64 bypasses the RBRx protection.

Panagiotis

 

Trying this out and attempted my first restore. Getting error "Restore failed, error -99969". It then states "Imaging Error C1000019". Any ideas Isso?

 

Which security software are you using? I got same error when i was testing Kaspersky IS.

 

Kent, Panagiotis, thank you very much for your hints. I would never think that Rollback may mess with WinRE. Why on earth it might need to rename it to .dat??

pratzert - thanks, will do my best!

 

Thanks Scoobs, the errors are quite strange, looks like something is messing with our modules, maybe Kaspersky as anuraag suggested, will check it out.

anuraag - thanks for the hint!

 

New alpha build officially released
http://ax64.com/temp/SetupAXTM_1_796.exe

Isso
Changelog?

 

Hey anuraag, that was fast

Changelog:

- Fixed intermittently freezing restore on machines with low memory
- Fixed a bug that sometimes resulted in corrupted backups of SSDs disks
- Fixed wrong display of some icons in Backup Browser
- Minor changes