Lets say hard drive failure.

As the folks said I've come close to simulating this,

First let me describe my setup. I have a primary snapshot which is my full working c: drive. I also have a secondary snapshot, which is just a sripped down windows with AV and firewall. I have archives of both. I rarely update, the secondary snapshot or archive, but I update the primary archive very frequently. My standard use of FDISR is to update the primary archive before doing something, then if I want ro revert back, I boot to secondary, refresh primary from primary archive, and then boot back to primary.

What I've done to answer your question is restore an image taken right after I got the system. Image just had c: drive with security software, and First Defense installed. No other snapshots. What I then did was create a secondary snapshot from the archive of secondary. Then booted to the secondary, and refreshed(copy/update) my primary from the archive. System was now current. No reason this wouldn't work if you say restored a factory recovery CD, and then installed FDISR.

I would still recommend a good imaging program just because it is so much quicker.

Pete

 

Hi Genady

First I have to tell you that the inspiration for my getting into the imaging stuff is our own Erik Albert. He really started me on the testing of images.

But to answer your question. First it is layers, as in security. Secondly a time convenience. If I want to try something that I consider low to medium risk, that I might want to undo, first I update my primary archive. This literally takes me about a minute. Then if I do want to undo something, I just boot to my secondary and update the primary from the archive, and boot back to primary. Total time is about 5 minutes. So it is quicker than taking an image, test restoring it, and then maybe restoring it.

But there is another big big reason I use both. I guess this fits in the layering concept. I have totally stopped bothering to verify images. My test of every image is to restore it. So the question that comes up is what happens if I try a restore and it fails. I've wiped my drive, and yikes the image fails. In that case I just restore an earlier image, which I have already confirmed restores, and then I can bring the drive current with the FDISR archive. Note, while I've never had a failure of restore with released versions of SP, I am beta testing it, and when you do that stuff can happen.

Hope this all makes sense.

Pete

 

Yes. My primary snapshot is my c:\ drive. Only one partition one whole drive, no anchoring.

Well updating from secondary to primary is possible, not not desirable. and yes in reality my real rollback snapshot is indeed the archive of the primary. 2 big advantages. First the actual copy time is much faster, and secondly, when FDISR initializes and does it's indexing, that is also twice as fast, as it doesn't index the archive.

I've been doing this now for a couple of months and it has worked perfectly. Has the additional advantage of keeping images smaller.

Pete

 

Yes if done accidently the primary archive is there. Just a time inconvenience. I always setup the copy, and then take my hands off the keyboard and look carefully at what I am about to do. THen do it.

archived primary is kept two places. Working copy on internal 2nd drive, and a "security" copy on external drive.

Pete