Rollback Rx Version 10 is out

I have been a contented user of Rx for apx 5 years and my attitude is rapidly changing, not so much because of the problems that are being experienced with V10, problems at this point are to be expected, but because of the way HD is handling customer concerns. See my post on the Rx forum at http://horizondatasys-forum.com/rollback-rx/12463-v-10-question-18.html

If someone comes up with a quality alternative I would be very interested to know about it,,,,not something that is in development and only has Korean help files,,,,but a tried and tested alternate that does what Rx does or more. I will stick with V9.1 for the foreseeable future (I do have gold support) as it works as I expect and require but when an alternate is found I believe I will switch without hesitation. A company that has such little regard for its clients is not one that I care to support.

 

Dearest Friend,

Very true that Rollback Rx is a very good product, but HDS is not good to their customers.

You seems to be in luck. See this thread and hopefully, the program will be out soon.

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=339999

Best regards,

Mohamed

 

Hi Mohamed, thanks for the link, I have been following the linked to thread you have provided. I would not consider this program until I see that is has been fully released and tested by a fairly significant number of users over an extended time frame (3 to 6 months at least). I am not willing to risk my ability to use my PC as its essential to my being able to make a living. I will continue to watch the unfolding of the AX64 Time Machine story with interest but as a viable solution for me its not there yet.

Thanks again.

 

OK..thanks....I shall try it and might stay with it as Horizon Datasys is still keeping me in auto loop with my emails..

 

Sticking with 9, it works.. Don't want to introduce bugs..

 

Thank you very much for the link. I will try this on my wife's computer while she is out of town again

Now, let me spit this out before it choke me, for it had been bothering me for weeks. After getting Rollback Rx on their December sale, I made a search on such type of software, and found out that there are actually several of them: Comodo Time Machine, Wondershare Time Shuttle, Ayrecovery, RollbackRx. Now, I really wonder why Ayrecovery, from Anyue, a Chinese Developer, has received very, VERY bad comments from many, but when I tested it on my wife's computer while she was out of town, I found it to be just alright, and actually, the snapshots were even faster than Rollback Rx. On reviewing their very VERY bad reviews, I found out that these things which they say about Ayrecovery can actually happen also in Rollback. But what I am amazed at is that Rollback almost always gets a good review, probably except for one disgusted person of loosing his data after using it.

Now, get ready for what you are about to hear. Comodo Time Machine, Ayrecovery, and RollbackRx, are almost identical in its features, even the choices in their menu are the same, even their bootup message. What is most staggering is that Ayrecovery and RollbackRx are like identical twins, only wearing different clothes. Even their main *.exe file, both has the name Shield. And when I tried to install Ayrecovery with Rollback installed, a message comes out that it cannot be installed because Ayrecovery is ALREADY installed!! It takes no intelligent person to say that they have the same source code. On further searching, I found out that someone said (2-3 years ago), that Ayrecovery, almost defunct now, sold their source code (by inside developers), for as low as $100 to others. But surprisingly, I found that they still have a website, and still doing business. Without further examination of the accuracy of such statement though, who took whose source code to have such identical software under different names, after my trial of Ayrecovery, I can definitely say that these 2 are of the same source code clothed differently. And also, on Ayrecovery website, some of the instructions on support, inadvertently (which I think is accidental) referred back to Wondershare. Is that not coincidental, when both Ayrecovery and Wondershare are Chinese companies, and also both sharing a "rollback" software. But now, nowhere can I find Wondershare Time Shuttle (Note: NOT Time Freeze)for trial download, nor for sale, although on searching, you can still find a download button, but not at all working.

Only the insiders will really know who took whose, who really is the originator. Both Rollback Rx and Ayrecovery independently claims to have 10 year in the development of this software. Did it came from the same developers working for 2 companies??

 

This one still seems to work:
http://www.softsalad.com/software/wondershare-time-shuttle.html

 

Thank you for the link. After failing several times to dowload with the warning of it being a dangerous file, I was able to download, installed smoothly, BUT it does not do anything when I tried to launch it, so uninstalled. Fortunately, uninstalled without issues.

I tried Kliver One-click, and did an error in choosing to install the console in a computer with both Windows and Linux. It made the Linux unbootable. The first snapshot took a long time. And on de-installation, made both unbootable. Have to repair the Windows MBR, and then re-install Grub to boot both system. Then tried to install this on my VMware server with WinXP, this time without the console, but resulted to BSOD, and crushed everything, making the virtual machine dead with no chance of recovery.

 

From my perspective, and horrific experience, Rollback Rx (and its clones) is a fantastic program when working properly. By far, the biggest problem with Rx is that it's not able to adequately protect it's own baseline snapshot!!!

Since the baseline snapshot is the very foundation (parent) in Rx's parent-child relationship with all subsequent snapshots, the entire system wiil come crumbling down if, for any reason, the baseline snapshot becomes corrupted or infected!

Because of this major shortcoming, it is imperitive that Rx users not become complacent with Rx's 'magical' rollback feature and make frequent disk-image system backups.

TS

 

Well said Shadow - that serious limitation reflects my disasterous experience with RollBack. Furthermore, HDS was slow responding to my problem and to 'rub salt into my wound' their support tech insisted that there's no way the Baseline snapshot can become infected.

In the end HDS was unable to provide any helpful support and so I discontinued using RollBack. As I see it, so long as I have to make frequent disk image backups while using RollBack, I might as well not use it and just rely on disk image backups (a heck of a lot simpler to do in a non-RollBack environment)!

Cruise

 

Question- If you're using snapshot #8 for instance, which is basically your system confined on a snapshot, how can the base line snapshot get infected? I would think that in that case the whole RB app would have to become infected as a unit. What's the probability of that possibility?

 

I have used Rollback Rx since Dec 19th 2005 and have also beta tested all but 1 version. That being said I have had only 2 times that I lost data. The first being the one I didn't test but tried out just to try it and the other I'm not sure what happened. I'm not saying that because I tested it and it works good on my system that it's foolproof but nothing is foolproof. Every version of Windows to date has crashed and some of those people lost data. One of the most used pieces of software in the world and it allowed data loss. There are many pieces of software that are not for everyone and if you don't like something by all means don't use it. No one is forcing you to. Use an imaging program if that's what you want to do. I think what you will find though is that for what Rollback Rx does (making quick snapshots and restoring them quickly, allowing you to mount those snapshots to get individual files out and so forth) it is in a league of its own. If this was an easy task this type of software would be flooding the market right now. HDS has sold Rollback for more than 6 yrs and yet there is still no viable alternative. Ask yourselves if its so easy to make this process perfect where small anomalies will never cause you to lose data why are there not plenty of other types of these programs. I believe Rollback Rx is the best option for what I use it for. Yes when drive cloner is able to backup Rollback Rx snapshots I'll be one of the first to install it. At that point it will make an almost perfect product perfect. Have a fast snapshot and restore system and have a backup of said system.

Thanks,

Chris

 

Hi Chris, I doubt that you will remember me but I bought my first copy or Rx through you, it was version 7. I have been a happy user of Rx as far as the program is concerned, many reversals, uninstalls and re-installs with no problem. I am however not especially pleased with Horizon Data Systems whose customer service is less than stellar. It has reached a point where if I can find a viable replacement I would jump, and it does appear that a replacement is close to hitting the market. A number of higher profile long time Rx users have indicated that they are impressed with the product and are considering a move when it is finally released for sale (see linked to thread below). If you are interested in finding out more about this software and what knowledgeable folks think of it you can do so at https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=339999

 

I do remember you now that you mention it! I'm glad you have been using rollback all these years. I do not sell/use anything I do not believe in. I'm sorry you and others have had support issues. Can you PM me what types of issues you/others are having? I would really appreciate it. Thanks for the link I have looked into it and read some of the replies. Well have to see how it does when released. In the mean time I may look more into it to compare with rollback rx.

Thanks,

Chris

 

I can't speak to probabilities. What I do know for a fact is that it happened to me! There I was 'computing along' as I did every day when all of a sudden my system froze-up on me. I figured no sweat, I'll just rollback to my previous Rx snapshot taken earlier that day, but upon system restart I encountered a BSOD!

I subsequently tried rolling back to each and every one of my dozen or so Rx snapshots (using Rx's boot-console), progressing from the most recent all the way back to the baseline. They all delivered the very same BSOD, with a message to the effect that I was missing a vital system component. To make a long story shorter, I had to resort to restoring my week-old (IFW) backup.

As I was very disappointed that Rx 'could not save my bacon' I researched the situation and found out that Rx is vulnerable to infection by certain rootkits containing a direct disk I/O driver which can overwrite any sectors. Rx's baseline snapshot exists on sectors which are locked against disk-writes via Windows' API, but not against direct I/O access. If Rx's baseline snapshot becomes infected (or corrupted for any reason) each and every subsequent snapshot will be corrupted (with no reconstruction possible)!

HDS would have us believe that Rx is able to bail us out of any malware attack - but I learned (the hard way) that just isn't true!!!

TS

 

Its not so much issues I have had but issues that others have had and reported that has me a bit spooked. Problems range from providing purchasers with an incorrect download link which resulted in at least one user who was using solid state drives to install on 3 of his PCs an older version of Rx that did not support SSDs. This resulted in a nightmare for this user. I also have a problem regarding an inability to easily locate information on the HDS site (I had this issue as have others).

There is also a bit of an issue with the marketing dept saying things that turn out to not be correct or rather, to be generous, misleading. One issue has to do with the MBR and what malware scanners interpret as a rootkit that turns out to be Rx related. We have asked HDS to tell people about this potential problem so that they will know that there is a likelihood of a false positive in the scans (a number of Rx users had major issues because they did not know this) but information still is not provided/available.

And on it goes.

Bottom line IMHO Rx is an excellent piece of software, its not perfect as you said, but dam good. I generally tend to be a pretty loyal user of software and devices. As long as they are working well I would normally stick with them even if something else comes along that is better in some respect. It is a real shame that HDS has managed to undermine Rx due to an apparent lack of interest or understanding of its clients needs.

Now to be fair things recently have def improved over on the Rx forum with the appearance of Gonzola, but its a bit late in the game for me and a number of others. If you are interested in specifics regarding Rx issues and HDSs handling of them take a look at some of the threads on Wilders started by Alladin. There are others but his are quite telling. Of course you can go to the HDS Rx forum (and the Drive Cloner forum) and see whats being said and experienced there. In the past a typical reply to a question would be "I have flagged this for the development team, in the meantime lets see if we can get some ideas for you from forum members", and that, often, is that last heard on the subject (see the last thread I started on the DC forum as an example). I went from being a big defender of Rx to decidedly cool on suggesting others use it. Its really a shame but sometimes there is a tendency for a company to undermine itself. This unfortunately, is one of those times.

 

That's sometimes the only way to be awakened from a false sense of security ...the root of that being misleading articles/blogs out of HDS, such as the following two examples of HDS propaganda:

Can you say m i s l e a d i n g ?

Cruise

 

I did not find the above misleading, most of the time, and I do mean most, this is exactly how Rx works. However there is malware out there that can get by Rx (to the MBR) this is not in any way indicated. The implication is that with Rx installed you need not do anything else. What should be pointed out is that images need to be done in case of the rare event that something gets by Rx that it cannot reverse, a hard drive failure, or the loss of the PC. This is an omission and as such is misleading.

Like I said the program is a very good one, it works almost all of the time as you would hope and expect. Its the folks behind it that are the problem.

 

Well, it didn't work as expected for The Shadow, myself, and from what I've read, others here on Wilders, and on HDS' Rx Forum. I would agree with you in that it''s a teriffic app when it works as advertized (unfortunately, some of us did not find that to be the case)!

I'll let it go at that....

Cruise

 

Holy crap! That's frightening.

 

Yes, you are correct that there have been problems as you say, but no company, except for perhaps the tobacco and drug companies, tell folks that there might be problems with the product they are selling. Any moderately informed consumer, and more so I think computer user, knows that problems can happen with both hardware and software. So from that point of view the promotion is not misleading. Its standard practise and its not appropriate to tar HDS with this and not all other producers of both software and hardware.

As more than moderately knowledgeable users of a computer it seems reasonable that before trying any program like RX, that a full a full drive image be created. Some who had a problem with Rx did this, some, did not. If they did and there was a problem, recovery is a relatively painless process. Would it be nice if HDS advised its users of this? Yes, of course. Are they obligated to do so? NO! No more than antivirus companies are obliged to advise customers that their program may not fully protect them, no more than Seagate is obligated to warn customers that its drives can fail, and no more Microsoft or Apple is obliged to warn its customers to be aware that they may, at some point, run into serious problems with their operating systems.

So no, the quotes provided above are IMO not misleading. The program is designed to do what we are told in these quotes. THat the program can fail should be understood. I have had more than one drive image fail over the years, thats why I make a lot of them, and I never blamed the company producing the imaging program for not warning me this could happen. There are a number of other HDS quotes you could have provided that are IMO misleading, but these are not examples of them.

I would prefer to not pursue this line of discussion further, we have each said our piece so lets leave it at that. What we do agree on is that HDS has done a substandard job when it comes to customer support.

 

When insatalling ver.10 do I need to unistall ver. 9 first?
Thanks

 

I would suspect so, given what Rx does I would think having it installed with snapshots and a baseline in existence installing over it is a recipe for disaster. ---- But I could be wrong.

 

A clean install is always best with any app. With upgrades within a version you usually can install over the top, but it's not a good idea with a new version number like v10 over v9.

 

Thanks