Paragon Drive Backup Home/Pro

I plan to give Paragon Drive Backup Home 9.0 a try this weekend for the 1st time. Please answer the following questions:

1. From your experience will the Pargon Drive Backup Home boot cd always boot and be able to restore with "any" hardware using one of the three modes (Linux, DOS, DOS Safe Mode)? I realize that the Pro version's Windows based boot CD is more hardware compatible, but have you ever found it necessary to use the Pro version because of hardware? Also, I may want to have the capability to restore from an NAS.

2. Is the Trial Version "fully" functional? In other words, can I make images and restore them with the Trial version to see if the program works to my satisfaction?

Thank You in Advance.

 

1. yes usb harddrive and slicon image raid controller driver on my nforce 3 chipset motherboard on my older pc. even with the better hardware support i still needed to feed the windows based recovery cd the raid sata driver.

i belive both linux based recovery cd and windows based recovery cd have the networking options. i know the windows based recovery cd definatly does.

2. the program is yes. but you will only be able to create a basic linux based recovery cd using the program.
think you will have to buy it before getting access to windows based recovery cd.

 

I corroborate everything Iodore said.

 

Do you guys think the Pro version is worth the extra to get the WinPE recovery environment as I see it is not available with the Personal edition?

 

Definatly

 

Thanx for that lodore.

 

Interesting, on their website they charge VAT @ 19% I thought VAT used to be 17.5% now reduced to 15%, dunno how they get away with charging 19% I'm sure that must be illegal.

 

Can I assume from the emboldened text that this means it will work ok with a RAID 1 setup? Afraid I am not all that familiar with how raid actually works, understand the principle behind the various levels, but not the actual mechanics of how it is done, and thus have no idea what software may interfere with raid or how.

 

any idea of what make of raid?
im guessing raid from the motherboard? if so what motherboard have you got
do you have any cd's with the raid drivers on it?
if you need to you can stick the drivers on a usb drive and ask paragon to load in the drivers if it doesnt already have the driver support. if you specify what motherboard you have above i can find you the lastest drivers which you can stick on a usb drive just incase.

 

Thanks lodore, will have to get back to you on that one, as I am away from home at the moment, should be back after the weekend, and don't want to guess and waste your time.

 

Hi lodore, yeah it is raid from the motherboard. Motherboard is an Asus P5N-D, I assume the drivers are on one of the cd's, haven't had a chance to look yet.

 

Hey tradetime,
yes they will be.
lastest drivers can be obtained from here
I didnt want to guess what OS you use so no direct link.

 

Thanx for that, so what exactly do I want these drivers for, raid is all new to me? The raid 1 is already setup, if I image the OS partition is all that not already in the image, bit lost on this lol.

 

Hello tradetime,
You may need some raid drivers so that the boot cd can "see" the raid hard drives. If you load up the paragon vistape cd and it doesnt show your hard drives using raid you will need to give the boot cd the drivers in order to see and backup the raid hard drives.
the paragon vistape has an option to load drivers from pretty much any device once loaded, such as a second optical drive,usb stick,floopy drive etc.
does this make any sence?

 

Ok, I will get back to you on this once I have the software (Paragon) Ordered through Amazon, as they had a deal on for about 19% 0ff, so hopefully it will all make a bit more sense once I am familiar with the software, doesn't help that I am not familiar with Raid either. I assume raid is something that exists/operates outside of or independent of the OS

Know what raid is, in it's various configurations in principle, just no real understand of how it does what it does.

 

Okay, lost a bit here, no surprises there. Booted into WinPE CD and attempted to image drive, got a bsod.

I'm assuming that before I did that I should have loaded the raid drivers?

On the subject of the raid drivers, the download from the Asus site provides a Zip file which contains utilities to "make a disk" unfortunately they only seem to want to make floppy disks which would be great if I were working with a computer that has a floppy drive.

The mainboard cd I have has within the Vista64 folder, 3 folders, one I can see is not what I am looking for the other 2 folders are; sata_ide and sataraid. I'm assuming I want the latter? If so within that there are 7 files. Would I be right in thinking the only one I want is the nvrd.inf file. The others are 2 x .sys files, 2 x .dll files a .cat, and a .nvu file.

 

Nobody? ok I'll give it a bash anyways.

 

Seem to have sorted it, loaded all the drivers in the 64bit folder and all went well.

 

glad you got it working.
I would of helped but I was away lol.
Have you tryed a backup and restore yet?
If so how did it go?

 

Hi Lodore, no worries mate, you were a great help. Have backed up, but I don't bother with the restore until I need to, just verify the image. When I need it it will work or it won't, the former being good, the latter being bad obviously. Testing it now would result in it working, good, or not working, bad. Now, if we take the worst case scenario, that being it doesn't work. With my approach, I may never need to restore, so I may never find out and thus never experience the bad. Whereas if I do a restore for no good reason other than to test it then I simply guarantee experiencing the bad.
I look at it a bit like an air bag in your car, you don't crash it to make sure the bag works, or body armour, you don't shoot yourself to make sure it works. Not a conventional view I know, but there you go
One thing I did notice though, when finishing the image with WinPE cd, and hit restart, the computer just goes to a blank screen with flashing cursor and I have to hot the reset.